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Do insulated wire antennas pick up less static than bare copper?
- Thread starter loosecannon
- Start date
The ladder line is feedline, like coax. It is balanced feedline and coax is unbalanced. Your receiver is most likely set up for a coax connection so I would buy some cheap tv coax and use that.
Where ladder line really shines is when using a single dipole on multiple bands for transmitting. You can use a tuner in the shack and have good efficiency. When you have high swr on coax the loss is very high. Even though the tuner give you a good swr in the shack there is still high swr on the feedline.
You will need some kind of balun to connect the ladder line to the receiver if it does not have one built in. If the antenna is not perfectly symmetrical and balanced it will suffer from common mode current issues. It will radiate if you were to transmit into it and it will pick up noise from every source along the way to your receiver. IMO it is not suitable for a longwire antenna.
For receiving only you don't have to be too particular about length. You really can't optimize it for 80 thru 6 meters. Often times an antenna that is low to the ground can have a better signal to noise ratio on the lower frequencies. Propagation changes this also. I would just hang up something as cheaply as possible and see what you hear.
Another thought if you go the ladder line route would be to use narrower spacers, 300 ohm ribbon cable or 450 ohm window line. The 4 inch spacers are good for HF but maybe not so much for 6 meters. I have used the 4 inch spaced ladder line on my HF doublet to transmit on 6m. I have made contacts but the antenna is so long there are a lot of lobes and nulls. The wide feedline spacing may also have a negative effect on noise and efficiency.