"Reg Edwards" wrote in message ...
"Jayne Medley" wrote
What to some of you think about a Windom Ant .
Looking to put one up. Can I work all bands
with no tuner like they say ?

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Jayne,

No you can't.

Who are "they" anyway ? Antenna salesmen ? Old-wives ?

There is NO antenna which will allow high radiating efficiency on all bands
without a tuner.

Just out of interest but what do you consider to be the low limit of a
" high radiating efficiency" for the HF bands? With a tuner,
without a tuner?
Art





In fact, there is NO antenna which will allow high radiating efficiency on
all bands even WITH a tuner, taking radiation pattern into account!

And to complete the depressing story there is no commercial tuner which will
cover all bands from 160 to 10 meters.

To work all bands efficiently, in any geographical direction, you need an
antenna farm containing at least 3 separate antennas, a reasonable ground
radial system, a number of transmission lines, with availability in the
shack of 3 different tuners.

However, the original Windom, which must have first been used 65 or 75 years
ago, well before it acquired a name from the first person to take the
trouble to describe it in a ham magazine, is a good all round performer. It
has to be - it's so simple.

The original Windom is a half-wave dipole, resonant at the the design
frequency, fed by a single wire transmission line of random length, the line
being tapped off-centre into the dipole. Radiation from the single-wire
feedline is intentional. Only a moderate sort of ground-radial system is
needed. But a tuner is needed to match any particular band to a 50-ohm
transmitter. In the olden-days a 50-ohm transmitter was unheard of.

Relatively modern versions of Windoms are bugged by the sales gimmicks of
supposedly balanced twin feedlines and baluns which do nothing but degrade
efficiency compared with the original simplicity. There is just as much
radiation from the off-centre-fed twin feedline. Antenna salesmen don't
mention the subject.

For performance of the original Windom, download in a few seconds and run
immediate;y program WINDOM2 from website below
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Regards from Reg, G4FGQ
For Free Radio Design Software
go to http://www.g4fgq.com
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