If you will remember a few weeks ago I posted my story about building
a rhombic. Status report - Two legs of it are up, meaning it is now a
vee beam ! Although this is only half of a rhombic much more than 1/2
of the work has been done, because the wires are up in three of the
four trees, and the feedline is attached and run into the tuner and
the tuner is working.

How's it performing, compared to my standard antenna, a 3 ele SteppIR
at 40 ft? Not so good. At times it is much, much noisier. Never has
the signal strength been stronger on the vee. But wait a minute, it
is not supposed to, it is much too short to qualify as a real vee
beam. The leg lengths are 192 feet, and on 20 meters should be more
like 6 wavelengths long. But it is not supposed to be a vee beam, it
is supposed to be the first half of a rhombic. On with the story.

Ok, I need a little advice. For my termination on the rhombic I found
the only power, non-inductive resistor I have in my junkbox is a 50
watt globar, 50 ohms. I want to match this to 450 ohms with a 9:1
broadband balun of some sort. I have determined with my modeling
program that 450 ohms is an ok termination for my antenna, and will
give me 19 db f/b (only a few db worse than other termination values I
modeled). So what kind of core do I buy? Ferrite, powered iron? 2
inch diameter? Looks like I can run the exciter barefoot and get by,
or put the glowbar in oil and get somewhat greater dissipation? But
for now, running with just 100 watts will satisfy me.

As an aside, I have begun reading this newsgroup with Outlook Express.
Not my favorite but at least it has the subject and sender filters,
which work like a champ. Now I get almost no QRM, although about 75%
of the messages are being rejected.

Rick K2XT