Up Antenna!

Thanks to help from Dave/KF4FFO and Tom/AJ4UQ, the antenna is now hoisted up into the trees and plugged into the radio. I didn’t get a chance to grab my camera, but Tom had his to take pictures with.

My Hyperdog ball launcher and 4 fishing weights with some lightweight line that Dave brought proved to be a very effective combination for getting rope and antenna up into the tree.

The arms of the antenna are arranged in kind of a tilted/rotated inverted L, with one side angled down and secured to shrubs at one corner of the house, and the other side nearly horizontal. Perhaps not an ideal configuration for this. Right now everything is secured with temporary knots. I’ll spend some more time making some adjustments to the antenna before securing everything down properly.

SWR tested with Dave’s Youkits analyzer showed pretty decent SWR and impedance at 20m and 40m (~1.7 or so), so-so at 80m, maybe usable at 15m and 30m with some tweaking and not so good at 10m. Since the antenna should be able to do 10m, there’s probably some adjustment that needs to be done with how things are arranged. I think I’m going to have to get myself one of those Youkits analyzers. They’re pretty slick.

Radio receives pretty well on 20m and 40m so far. I can hear the WWV time signal at 5 MHz and 10 MHz pretty clearly. Heard lots of CW and digital signals on 20m after connecting up the antenna. Need to test how well I can get out next.

Right now the coax feed line just runs along the ground, but I think I’ll look into routing it through the crawl space so that it’s not lying out in the elements and won’t get run over by the lawn mower.

Now an interesting exercise will be to figure out how to use something like EZNEC and try to model what the antenna is doing.