Two 100 x 3 ft rolls of chicken wire were added this fall. I have about 45 radials, good conductivity, clear view, and the sump pump dumps out nearby. It is quiet in the country but the beverages are better. I am putting up a SAL30. It will be better for USA contests. The F/B is good enough that you can tell someone is calling.
K9ZO ________________________________ From: Topband <topband-boun...@contesting.com> on behalf of Todd Goins <tgo...@gmail.com> Sent: Friday, December 28, 2018 5:35:53 PM To: TopBand List Subject: Topband: Inverted L improvement question - Part 2 I originally started this thread and I want to once again thank everyone who provided input and advise both privately and on the reflector. So the 100' tall vertical with the 30' horizontal loading wire works **horribly**. I have about a week with it now every evening and it is much, much poorer transmitting (and receiving, as expected I guess) than the 43' vertical with the 90' horizontal. Since everyone was united in the opinion that I needed a dedicated receiving antenna I put out a 200' BOG (pointing east) with the transformer and terminating resistor from DXEngineering. The BOG is really quiet (S1-S2) compared to the verticals and it hears "okay" but I wouldn't say it was great by any means. The Stew Perry tomorrow will give me better chance to evaluate it. Back to the 100' vertical. Since it wasn't working being tied into the buried radial field I was using for the 43' (PSK Reported showed dreadful performance) I decided to take a different approach and made it have an elevated feed point at about 7' above ground and I ran three 130' elevated (also around 6' to 7' high) counterpoise wires. This antenna works a little better but still not nearly as good as the 43'. Several people asked me to make R/Z measurements of the antenna at the feed point. I'd love to provide that info but my Comet CAA-500 MarkII antenna analyzer is being totally killed on 160m by a 27.5KW AM broadcast station that is about 2 miles from my QTH. It will not work. The analyzer has been fine on 6-40m and sometimes works on 80m but 160 is no-go. So I can't get the reactance and resistance values you all wanted. So, here is my question. The one easy modification I can make to the antenna, now that I have elevated radials connected, is that I can elevate the feed point. I can raise it to about any height necessary. Would this make any difference? I would lengthen the horizontal wire by whatever distance I raised the feed point, right? Any ideas or am I just chasing my tail? Thanks for reading and any advise you can give. 73, Todd - NR7RR _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector