A few years ago a buddy was cleaning out his garage and gave me this antenna, though the box was decomposing, it had never been put together, let alone put up in the air.
I haven't been interested in 11M until just recently, haven't been on the band for about 25 years. So when the bug hit me and I found this thing in my garage, I made a mad search through all the junk here for all the pieces. Found them all except....
I must have tried to load this thing up on 40M, (yep I'm a ham too, but have no problems keeping the two worlds separate, even though both are just about playing with radios and chatting w/ friends.) or something similarly ridiculous, because I apparently took out the little PCB matching coil in the base. Couldn't find it. So I made a new and improved version. It started out as 10.5 turns of 12GA house wire wrapped around a TV mast (1 1/4"?) but as you can see from the pic, needed to short out three turns. An antenna analyser is a lifesaver here. So 7.5 turns, and I got <1.1:1 on ch 19 with the tap at 3 turns from the bottom... or 4 1/2 down from the top, either way you look at it. (and not too shabby on 10M either)
Had some extra 7/16" Heliax, so that's what it's fed with.
I just got a Bearcat 980 SSB as I've never had a SSB CB rig. I've modded out the damn beep,(WTF???) but have to get some other test equipment sorted out before I'll get my full 4 watts out of it. Only said hello to a few locals so far. I've got a lot of boxes full of tubes, (I like tubes, hence the name) would be fun to build something to add fire to the wire. I figure that new coil is at least good for a 100W!
Hope to talk to some of you on the air.
Later,
807
I haven't been interested in 11M until just recently, haven't been on the band for about 25 years. So when the bug hit me and I found this thing in my garage, I made a mad search through all the junk here for all the pieces. Found them all except....
I must have tried to load this thing up on 40M, (yep I'm a ham too, but have no problems keeping the two worlds separate, even though both are just about playing with radios and chatting w/ friends.) or something similarly ridiculous, because I apparently took out the little PCB matching coil in the base. Couldn't find it. So I made a new and improved version. It started out as 10.5 turns of 12GA house wire wrapped around a TV mast (1 1/4"?) but as you can see from the pic, needed to short out three turns. An antenna analyser is a lifesaver here. So 7.5 turns, and I got <1.1:1 on ch 19 with the tap at 3 turns from the bottom... or 4 1/2 down from the top, either way you look at it. (and not too shabby on 10M either)
Had some extra 7/16" Heliax, so that's what it's fed with.
I just got a Bearcat 980 SSB as I've never had a SSB CB rig. I've modded out the damn beep,(WTF???) but have to get some other test equipment sorted out before I'll get my full 4 watts out of it. Only said hello to a few locals so far. I've got a lot of boxes full of tubes, (I like tubes, hence the name) would be fun to build something to add fire to the wire. I figure that new coil is at least good for a 100W!
Hope to talk to some of you on the air.
Later,
807
