Ham Help Desk

A friend is exploring antenna choices at his QTH and needs advice on some new antenna styles to try.

I stopped by for a visit to discover a very large yard with ample room for all kinds of wires antennas.

One issue my friend has it noise on his current antenna.

While his home is an excellent blank canvas waiting for lots of amateur radio antenna possibilities, I thought a full-wave loop might be a real good next-antenna to try.

Which full-wave loop to try first: 40 meter, 80 meter, 160 meter, more?

Google Earth comes to our aid with the excellent program.

Here is a view of my friend’s home…

Using the excellent tools in Google Earth I added two notional loop possiblities: a red line loop as large as the yard, and a 160 meter full wave loop in white. Isn’t this a nice big yard?

For the while loop I included the feed line as part of the total loop length to ensure a reasonable loading appears at the feed point in the house.

Using Google’s measuring tools I confirmed the white loop’s length to be around 525 feet or so including both sides of the transmission line. The red loop is about 680 feet total.

Simulations reveal the usual big lobes at higher frequencies and good behavior at low frequencies.

The big question is do we take full advantage of the yard and make the great big loop, or do we stick with a 160 meter full wave loop and live with that?

Anyone have any thoughts?

One thing I notice a lot during contests with my trusty Icom IC-746 (pre pro) is the splatter from power house stations nearby in frequency. I realize I can’t keep their splatter out if it falls within the passband of my receiver. However, I can at least try a more narrow filter to mitigate out of band energy.

The IC-746 comes with a 2.4 kHz wide filters for the first 9 MHz IF and for the second 455 kHz IF along with some wide options for AM and FM use.

I purchased this radio from a CW operator so it was no surprise what I found in the two 9 MHz optional slots: 350 and 250 kHz filters. They work real well for CW and, I suppose, the wider of the two would be good for RTTY work which I am just starting to use.

However, I do lots of SSB work and often get the AGC following the nearby signals rather than the one I want. So I really wanted to try out the 1.9 kHz Icom FL-223. It did not take long to find one on E-Bay from… Taiwan no less. In about a week I had my package.
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A fellow club member is preparing to put up a big 160 meter horizontal loop antenna. Nice. We have discussed many options and conclude ladder line is the best approach to connect the loop to the operating point.

He went shopping online only to find many vendors are low in stock of many items including the 400ish ohm windowed ladder line. We both agree making our own is a viable option.

So here is a photographic step by step we took in 2005 to construct the spreaders of our ladder line fed dipole antenna we use for Field Days, JOTA and other events requiring a simple antenna.

Since our antenna is used for various events it is not in the weather long. We opted to use wood spaces soaked in paraffin.
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I just came back from helping prep a ham station for a Camporee coinciding with the world wide Jamboree on the Air (JOTA) event.

They have just two antennas: a two meter omni and a ladder line fed 135 foot dipole. The dipole is inverted V style atop 12 sections of 48 inch aluminum military mast. The top of the antenna is about 54 feet AGL. Coupled with a good balanced tuner, this thing can work quite well on most of the bands.

Tomorrow we will give it the big test. I know it will work fine because it has already proven its worth during many field days.

If the only antenna you have it a ladder line fed dipole, put it up and go for it.

I was chatting with a club member this weekend. He told me about a digital slow scan tv modulation mode designed for use in the HF bands on a typical SSB bandwidth.

I know about analog slow scan television and have heard about many binary transfer methods for HF. This was the first time I heard something coined “Digital Slow Scan TV.” The program is called Easypal and can be found easily via a web search.

There appears to be a dedicated team behind this program which suggests a healthy development effort.

Indeed, after downloading the program and installing it on a Windows XP system, I was using it in no time. My friend was on the local repeater at the time and guided me through appropriate default options to use.
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A Lighthouse QSO Party organized in the traditional QSO Party theme sounds fun, but would anyone care?

There is nothing like combining aspects of Field Day with a QSO Party style contest. Or is there?

Visit QSOParty.com for discussion about the creation of a new QSO Party.

Here are some details regarding the next, and probably last, phase of my 43 Foot DX Engineering vertical installation.

This post is very late. The actual date of the events within it are just before March 2009 in preparation for the Virginia QSO Party.

In the many posts within this site, it is no secret my examination of various vertical antenna solutions with comparison between BigIR and the 43 Foot products a big part of this. Check out all the 43 Foot posts on HHD here…
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Earlier this year I purchased the Navigator from US Interface. It has done a very nice job mopping up various connections between my computer and the Icom IC-746 transceiver.

I used this fine interface with great success, however, last week it blew its fuse.
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It seems the hexagonal beam has come of age as multiple manufacturers square off in an attempt to claim market share of the growing market for this style of antenna.

Ever since the 2009 QST article many folks, myself included, became aware of the simple elegance of the Hexagonal Beam (also known as Hexbeam generally and Hex-Beam® by Traffie Technology).
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Tom, ke6ynh, asks…

“Why don’t hams like vertical dipole antennas.
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