Telamon wrote:

In article ,
"Rikk" wrote:

"Rikk" wrote in message
...
Hi I am wondering if I have my longwire set correctly, maybe you
could advise please. At the moment I have a sloping long-wire of
about 50 foot, going from the top of a mast on my house about 35
foot tall to the top of a washing line post about 12 foot tall. I
have connected the lonwire to my radio by means of CB-coax, what I
have done is to attach the centre core of the coax to the longwire
and I have cut the outer sheath on the coax near to the ground and
connected an earhtwire that is soldered to a cold water main supply
pipe as an earth. Only the centre wire on the coax is connected to
the actual longwire.

Is there a way I could do better.

I am thinking about getting an active antenna, the Sony AN-1

Would this work better for me or is there a better alternative
available. I am running an Icom R72 thanks Rikk



Hi Guys Thanks all very much for your help, I appreciate your
comments, I have opted to order a balun from a supplier mention on
this thread and see how it goes from there. I shall also try a few of
your other suggestions as they are really interesting in therory. As
you can probably see, I am relativly new to sw and until now have
been using the SW77 on it's telescopic antenna, but time for me to
move forward a bit, so I will see what I can do with the R72 thanks
again

You are off to a good start and as someone else in the thread already
mentioned you could improve the random wire performance with a UNUN
impedance matching transformer at the coax/random wire junction.

This wire should already be working better then the whip. You can tune
through the bands to get an idea how well it is working. Usually good
wire performance will start at the 1/4 wavelength frequency of the wire
length and will work well from that frequency on up except at even
multiples of that 1/4 wavelength so 1/2 wavelength would not be good.

As long as the even multiple does not fall on a SW band you are OK.

Some people use more than one wire. I think this is a game plan that
DxAce uses with two separate wires one twice the length of the other. I
think he uses a 100 and 200 foot lengths. Where one would be at zero
volts at the end of the wire the other would be at maximum. If at a
non-resonate wavelength they could look the same.

Since your long length is 50 foot you tie on another 25 foot wire at the
coax junction and hang the far end off the 50 foot wire a few feet with
an insulator of fishing line as an example. Not as clean as two separate
wires but it should work well.

A 50 foot wire in air should be 1/4 wave resonate at about 9.7 MHz. The
9 MHz band would be your best to pick up signals with the 50 foot wire.

I'm using a 70' wire running N-S and a 200' wire running W-E.

dxAce
Michigan
USA