My 160M Home-Brew Antenna

As we are at the beginning of the 160M season in the Northern hemisphere, the time has come to build an antenna for 160M. The antenna I decided to build came from www.DJ0IP.de and was initially designed to be used with an 18M Spiderbeam fiberglass pole for portable operating.

I didn’t have the Spiderbeam pole laying around, but I did have a bunch of aluminum antenna parts handy. The first order of business was to get enough aluminum to erect a 59 ft vertical section. Once gathered, the connecting sections had to be cleaned.

Also needed for this build is four – 50 ft lengths of wire for the top hat.

When all the vertical components were cleaned, a rough assembly was performed to measure, mark and place the brackets for the guy wires and top hat.

So far so good! The sections are all cleaned, marked and ready for final assembly. As soon as the remaining brackets are delivered I can finalize the build on the ground, and get ready to stand it up.

It took five brave hams to stand this noodle up! But it is now vertical!

Because we had the wind pick up as we were trying to guy the antenna, the top-hat was not tuned in favor of standing the antenna up safely. Because of this, the initial measurements were not usable as you can see.

Still haven’t done my final tuning as I needed a tall step ladder. Now that I was able to borrow one from a local ham the final tuning will happen on Friday. However, I got a little impatient and decided to do some classic Redneck engineering. What I did was shunt load the antenna. You can see in the picture the quality of this kludge. However it gave me the following.

Resonance at 1,936.540 kHz with an SWR of 1.27:1 and a 1.5 SWR bandwidth of 45 kHz. The 2.0 SWR bandwidth is 86 kHz.

I also realize the antenna is nowhere near 100% efficient. Most likely closer to 50 – 60% in this configuration using my AT-2K to do the final tuning. But the log snippet shows it works and will only get better once properly tuned.

MORE TO COME AFTER FINAL TUNING!