In article ,
dxAce wrote:

Telamon wrote:

In article ,
dxAce wrote:

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.

Were the two different lengths intentional or that they fit your
home lot? The different lengths do work in your favor.

Pretty much intentional, but they fit my lot which is 85' wide by 463
deep.

I do have a bit of leeway with the neighbours permission for some
longer lengths, but this setup seems to work fairly well, and my
target list these days is quite short, at least country wise.

I'm quite envious of the fact that you can use that type of antenna.
Much to electrically noisy around here for me to do that and about 40
feet is the best I can do anyway on this small lot.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California