RadioBanter - View Single Post - Lattin antenna.............more info sources

April 10th 04, 03:59 PM

In article ,
(Lee Carkenord) writes:

It seems to me that there are two major issues with the Lattin/W4JRW
antenna: 1) Mechanically, it can be challenging. Regular Twin Lead with
one of
the wires cut is just too flimsy.

When I tried to build a working version of the Lattin, I had 2
partners. The 3 of us, collectively, have a decent amount of
experience with home-brew antennas.
Our first attempt was done using flat TV twin-lead. It was fragile
and hard to work with, mechanically. Electrically, it was just
confusing. Unpredictable. I never felt that we were close to getting
a good workable multi-band antenna.

Some time passed, and we decided to try again. This time we used the
much sturdier ladder line (for traps/radiator) as a starting point.
Mechanically, this was a fairly robust device. Electrically, it was
the same as our previous attempt. We spent a lot of time with it.
Cut up a lot of wire. We finally reluctantly gave up. We _WANTED_
it to work, but we were just not able to get anything accomplished.
Again, we felt that we were never close to having a workable, 50 ohm
coax-fed, multi-band antenna.

That's quite understandable, given that the original Lattin designed used
tubular Twin Lead and countd on a velocity factor of 0.8.

What sort of test gear and design methods did you folks use?

73 de Jim, N2EY