Another chapter in my decades long 'quest to find the worlds worst
antenna configuration' (QTFTWWAC)...
This weekend I hurled into the air another conglomeration of consisting
of three pieces of ugly bent, used wire.... After tree branches, bird
droppings, and gravity did its thing I wound up with a bottom fed, half
lambda vertical for 40 meters, with a pair of elevated radials... The
bottom of the antenna is 7 feet up, the 2 radials slope from there to
about 3 feet...
Being that the antenna analyzer had dead batteries (my magic fingers
left it on again), I tuned the matching network by the method I learned
as a lad, putting a brick on the key I went out to the antenna and
using a pencil to draw an arc off the wire I tuned the cap for maximum
sparks... Trudged the hundred yards back to the shack and plopped down
in front of the radio... Quick check showed swr to be 2.8:1 at the
bottom of the band rising to 1:1 above the top of the band... In my
youth before swr meters this would have been a raging success...
Anyway, the swr a bit too much for the amp at 7005 kc so I ran the Omni
barefoot getting about 70 watts out... The band was weakly open into
eurasia... FIrst Q was a UA3, then a UA9, followed by by G, DL, EA,
EI, etc., for a round dozen DX Q's in about 40 minutes...

OK, so this antenna is another dismal failure in my QTFTWWAC, don't use
this antenna configuration if you want to be able to hold your head up
in polite company... If you do go off into the weeds don't smoke em
and decide to use it, a few more radials will get that last dB, or so,
out of it... Christman finds a round dozen elevated radials to be the
sweet spot between improvement and vanishing returns... Now, that work
was done for quarter lambda verticals which need the ground as the
antenna image, so it may not translate directly to a half lambda
vertical which is a balanced monopole... Here the radials mostly keep
the coax from getting too friendly with the antenna, and partially
screens the night crawlers from a sunburn...

The intent is to do FS measurements with 2, 4, and 8 elevated radials
to see if this configuration responds differently than a quarter
lambda... Yesterday I went out in the meadow with the 706 and a battery
in a garden cart... I tuned the parallel network for 1:1 at 7050kc...
The antenna covers the whole band at less than 1.5:1 without
retuning... In testing I called a quick CQ and had a w4bkd/m come back
to me... He's an OT like me, but said this was the first time he worked
someone standing out in a field, up on a ladder, with the radio clamped
under his arm, holding the paddles in his hand, in the rain... I
surmised that given my usual mental state that this was pretty much SOP
for me...

Dunno if I will get to the radial tests... This week end it has to come
down so the highly secret 80 meter arrays complete with decoder ring
in the box for CQWW can go up, as I continue on the trail to the holy
grail of the QTFTWWAC...

sar, bni, ymmv

denny / k8do