With so much talk about HOA/wife antenna restrictions I decided months ago to experiment again with an attic antenna. I didn't, until now. Because of the weather lately with my feedline buried in snow drifts my main end fed multiband HF wire antenna had become unreliable. I don’t do outdoor antenna repairs in temperatures under 20°.
I ordered some slinking. I failed to look closely at my order and I purchased the 2" diameter slinking instead of the original 3.5". Oh, well. So I strung up a cord in my attic near the peak of its greatest length, about 40' long. I put a two slinkies on the rope, one for each side of a center fed dipole, and stretched them out to ~11' each. To the ends of each of the slinkies I added another 21' of wire.
I now had a dipole that measured 32' on each side, or 64' total. The dipole is fed with a 10' section of 1' wide twinlead, and then a 10' length of coax down to the tuner ( I will be replacing the whole feedline with 450 Ohm to my other tuner, a balanced unit).
It will tune from 80m to 10m as it is.
The most difficult band to tune is, oddly, 20m.
I get ~1.8:1 SWR there. Everywhere else is ≤1.5:1 SWR.
It has great ears. And the only contact I have had time to make was given a 56, while I received at 58. That was on 20m only 1100 miles away.
More later as I refine the components and feedline, etc.
I ordered some slinking. I failed to look closely at my order and I purchased the 2" diameter slinking instead of the original 3.5". Oh, well. So I strung up a cord in my attic near the peak of its greatest length, about 40' long. I put a two slinkies on the rope, one for each side of a center fed dipole, and stretched them out to ~11' each. To the ends of each of the slinkies I added another 21' of wire.
I now had a dipole that measured 32' on each side, or 64' total. The dipole is fed with a 10' section of 1' wide twinlead, and then a 10' length of coax down to the tuner ( I will be replacing the whole feedline with 450 Ohm to my other tuner, a balanced unit).
It will tune from 80m to 10m as it is.
The most difficult band to tune is, oddly, 20m.
I get ~1.8:1 SWR there. Everywhere else is ≤1.5:1 SWR.
It has great ears. And the only contact I have had time to make was given a 56, while I received at 58. That was on 20m only 1100 miles away.
More later as I refine the components and feedline, etc.