Tag: 6m

6m/10m attic dipole

Joining the 2m ground plane antenna in the attic now is a 6m/10m fan dipole.

There are too many rafters and roof supports above the ceiling to easily get a longer antenna into the attic, but a 10m dipole is short enough to get up there with some reasonable effort. I decided might as well make it a fan and add 6m to it as well.

Getting the antenna installed in the attic and connected up turned out to be a process that spanned a few weeks, but yesterday I finally got it connected up to the antenna analyzer (RigExpert Stick 230) and got everything trimmed up to about as good as it was going to get.

SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 6m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 6m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 6m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 10m band
SWR screen grab from the RigExpert 230 for the 10m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 10m band
6m/10m fan dipole SWR across the 10m band
SWR plots from the RigExpert Stick 230 acquired using the Antscope Android app.

The SWR is under 3 for most of the 6m band dipping down to just above 2 around 51 MHz. For the 10m band, the SWR is under 2.6 across the band and dipping down to just above 2.2 at about 28.8 MHz.

The radio’s internal antenna tuner seems to handle the antenna pretty well. Now to see if I can make any contacts with it…

Working on 6m

Well, not only does the radio tune the antenna on 6m/50 MHz, but the radio and antenna seem to work pretty decently.

Spent about 3 hours tuning around on 6m in the  Central States VHF Society 6m Sprint contest last night in seek and pounce mode. Tallied up 10 contacts all from grid squares in the northeast plus one in Wisconson. Got some VA3/VE3 stations too. All of them were coming in pretty loud here. I came across several other stations that were just barely audible in the noise. I could hear something there, but not enough to try to work them. Most of the activity I heard was in the lower portion of the 50 MHz band, below 50.3 MHz. I went as high as 50.5 MHz, but didn’t go much higher.

A bit of Googling brought me to this ADIF mapping utility by K2DSL that puts my contacts onto a Google map based on the grid square. It’s kind of neat to see where the signals are coming from.



View Larger Map

I think I’ll add some kind of 6m antenna to the list of Things To Build for the summer. Will be interesting to see if I can make some more distant contacts with a dedicated antenna.