Hi All- I have recently moved to a new QTH - at a rental house in the country - and have totally rebuilt my 160 meter antenna system from the ground up. Luckily - the landlord was okay with me putting up a tower - and I have 77 feet of tower with a MonsterIR on top of it. I connected the two elements at each end of the boom - to the boom (thanks ZL3IX for inspiration) and it loads very nicely on 160 meters when tuned to 10 mHz. I have 25 radials down - and the transmit antenna works fantastic.
But - I wanted to share my results on the receiving side of the equation. I purchased a used Hi-Z 4 square from K7FL (80 foot spacing) and it is nestled into a side yard with the closest element only about 40 or 50 feet from the transmit antenna. A second element is about 70 feet away. I have been pretty happy with the performance of this array on RX. It is situated so it "points" just a bit east of due North (instead of the more typical NE / SE / SW / NW orientation). That way it is dead on for EU - JA and the East coast. The landlord was also okay with me stringing a Beverage across the winter wheat field - and I was able to put one up this weekend - pointing around 100 degrees - which is the heading I normally point for working domestic contests. According to Google maps - it is somewhere between 1200 and 1300 feet long. It's about 4 - 5 feet in height - terminated with 450 Ohms and fed with a homebrew 9:1 transformer (simple 3 windings in series - not using an isolated ground). The SWR was 1.2:1 when measured in the shack with low power. Comparing the Beverage to the 4 SQ was interesting. Just around sunset on the second day of the contest - signal strengths were nearly identical - but I could hear a db or two less noise on the beverage. However, an hour or so after sunset - the noise seemed to be nearly identical. The fact that the 4 SQ was holding its own compared to the Beverage was great news. I used both antennas with the diversity reception in my K3 - and was very happy with the results. The 4 SQ picked up the W6 / Arizona stations better than the beverage - so those signals were easy to pick out by their placement in the stereo image. In the morning - I switched the 4 SQ towards JA and could also easily tell when one was calling me. Now it is raining hard this week - and it appears I will have lots of water around the TX antenna - so I am looking forward to playing with it during the next few weeks - and of course in the Stew Perry contest coming up on December 26th. http://www.kkn.net/stew/ 73 Tree N6TR Hillsboro, Oregon _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband