Thanks Fred for your comments.
Today I tried out the 40m band and got great reports from a mobile op who
was over 400miles away to the south of me and another op in his shack about
the same distance north, both said I put in a very good signal, and
strangely enough I was the same signal strength in comparison to another
operator who was operating from his shack 15 miles due west of me, to both
other other operators.

I intend to put a 2m/70cm antenna on top, but to do this I will have to do
some machining to the hub as it was machined out of a solid billet of
aluminium.

It has certainly exceeded my expectations.

73
John
VK2KCE


"Fred McKenzie" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"HRBE" wrote:

I re-read N1GY's original and he mentioned in his article about the
actual
placing of the whips.

I followed his directions and placed the 75m and 40m whips at right
angles
to each other and the ather two pairs of whips in a like manner.

This then made the whole job a little easier, but the 20m whips are not
as
sharp in tuning as the other pairs.

John-

I built the Octopus, but decided to go one further. I added a Ten Meter
vertical whip on top, thinking the other elements would act as an
effective counterpoise. It didn't work! Apparently a Ten Meter
counterpoise element is needed.

Just using the basic 4-band design, it seemed to have quite good SWR
dips, and responded to tuning. It did not have your problem. It does
use whips like (or close to) the ones in the article, not true Hamsticks.

However, I kept trying to add Ten Meters. By changing one of the ground
elements to a hot element, and adding two 45 degree upward-tilted
grounded elements on a bracket, I was able to "share" one of the
dipoles. If one band's hot element is on the north end, then its
grounded element is the southern 45 degree element, and vice-versa for
the second band.

I tried various pairings of Ten, Fifteen and Twenty, but there was
always one band of the two that suffered with either a poor SWR dip
and/or a center frequency shifted downward. I ended up sharing Fifteen
and Ten Meters, with Ten Meters being the band that suffered. Even with
a poor dip, the SWR is below 2:1 over the entire Ten Meter band.

So far, Ten Meters is the only band I've gotten signal reports on, and
only for local contacts. In that situation, it seems to compare
favorably to a mobile installation with a single whip.

Fred
K4DII