Hey gang,
I had a fun Saturday experimenting with antennas and wanted so share some
of my experiences. All of my experiments fell under the cateogry of,
there was no good reason why the antenna should have worked at all, but I
made a contact anyway.
For example,
Only a fool would load a full wave 40 meter delta loop on 20 meters and
enter the WPC SSB contest with a 3 watt signal. Snagged 4B1AC (Mexico) on
my first call with a 59 report. (OK, so Mexico isn't very far from Texas,
but I was proud of it anyway!!!).
I wired together a "Field Day Special" 2 element 20 meter wire beam as
posted to the list a couple of weeks ago, by K10J(?)-Owen in Houston.
Wired the "wrong" end with the feed line and "pointed" my signal right out
to the Gulf of Mexico. Not only that, I didn't have any trees to connect
the ends of the antenna to, so I just laid it out on top of the wood
shingles on the roof of the house. If ever the odds were stacked against
an antenna working this was it. I heard KC7FWZ (Terry) in Tempe, AZ
calling CQ and again, I got him on my first call. He was 579 and he gave
me a 569 and we carried on a rag chew for about 20 minutes on 20 meters.
Makes me wonder what this antenna could do if I got it up in the air and
pointed in the right direction?
What really made my weekend is that I used a 16 foot section of electrical
conduit leaning against the side of the house (ground-mounted) with 4
radials (a foot wide wire netting) and contacted K1FK (AL)...my first New
Hampshire contact. Got what was for me, a rare state. The vertical is
mounted "below" my house in a fairly deep ravine surrounded by trees and
steel I-beams that hold up my house. Only the top 4 feet of the antenna
rest against the house. No reason for it to work, but it did. I only got
a 339, but we carried on a rag chew for about 25 minutes.
The last two contacts were made with my NW20 and Super T tuner. The SSB
contact was made with Dave Benson's White Mountain 20 (See April QST) and
the Super Tee.
I guess the moral to this story is, don't wait for the perfect antenna
system to have fun. Experiment, get on the air, make the best antenna you
can and you can still make lots of contacts. Sure, I would like to have a
2 element Yagi at 120 feet for my 40 meter contacts, but you'll find me
ice skating in hell before I get that antenna system going on this city
lot:-)
Hope your weekend was as much fun as mine.
Gary, KJ5VW
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