{"id":95,"date":"2021-10-22T21:32:59","date_gmt":"2021-10-23T04:32:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/?p=95"},"modified":"2021-11-03T06:29:36","modified_gmt":"2021-11-03T13:29:36","slug":"my-160m-home-brew-antenna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/2021\/10\/22\/my-160m-home-brew-antenna\/","title":{"rendered":"My 160M Home-Brew Antenna"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Also needed for this build is four – 50 ft lengths of wire for the top hat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
59.5 ft of glorious aluminum!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It took five brave hams to stand this noodle up! But it is now vertical! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
160M is now vertical!<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

MORE TO COME AFTER FINAL TUNING!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":116,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/na7cs.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}