wrote in message
...
A high SWR on it's own is not always bad news. It depends
on the feed line used, freq, etc.
The main reason the G5RV's don't do so hot is the goofy
method of feeding most seem to use. IE: a length of twin lead
to a choke, to coax. And then some add insult to injury and
run a tuner at the shack. A good amount of power is turned to
heat. But if you feed the same antenna with ladder line the
whole route, the losses are not so bad, even with a high SWR.
If you tune the line and use no tuner, fairly low losses.
If you use a tuner, not quite as good, but not too bad if you
use the least amount of inductance needed to get a usable match.
All antennas will radiate nearly all power applied to them.
The trick is getting it from the rig to the antenna without
turning some into heat. This is where the usual G5RV is failing.
Some of the power is not making it to the antenna due to obtuse
lossy methods of feeding. Same issue with some of the windoms, etc
that are sold.


I have not used the g5rv except for some the club uses at field day. From
what I understand about them, they were designed to work on 20 meters. It
was just luck that they will have a reasonable low swr on other ham bands.
If the swr goes up over 3 or 4 to 1 I can see lots of power being lost in
the coax part.

I use a home made version of the off center fed. I can compair it to an 80
meter dipole and a triband beam. It usually matches the dipole or is
sometimes beter depending on the direction of the other stations on 80
meters. On 20 and 10 meters the beam is usually much beter, but if a
station hapens to be in certain places there is not too much differance .
The ocf does not work very well on 15, but it is not suspose to.
All antennas are fed with Davis Bury flex rg 8 type which does not have too
much loss.