Thanks Guys, As you know I have a lot of fun building antennas, and this build with a slightly different bent to it ( pun intended ) appealed to me.
Just some thoughts on the tuning. Like the moxon close enough works. But you only see the wide bandwidth and high front to back when correctly tuned, and it is a product of the elements ends bent towards each other. Dick Bird called it critical coupling.Not that critical though, and you can see it on a swr meter or with an analyzer.
When I first put the ant up I guessed the driven length , adding parasitic elements nearly always means you have to shorten the driven a little .
First test looked good 1.5 swr 68 ohms at 27.220 with a bandwidth of about 500 kcs (nothing special )I then did a full scan and to my surprise I found a second dip 1 mhz lower. Some have reported this on their moxon builds as well. Ring a bell anyone.
After thinking about it for a while I shortened the reflector about 4 inches by folding the ends back. Second scan showed some interesting results. Resonate frequency was now 27.000 57 ohm 1.2 swr but I now had a bandwidth of over 1mhz with only a single dip.
Finally I shortened the driven a little more to get resonance higher. The 2 to1 bandwidth of this ant is 2mhz and the front to back and gain seems to remain about the same across the entire bandwidth. My 5 element yagi for example , detunes rapidly after 500kcs. Like I said earlier it will still work even if you don't get this far. P.S. The dimensions at the top are my final measurements.
come on you have got to turn that dipole into a beam its just begging for it( when the snow stops)
