On May 12, 1:04*am, wrote:
On Tuesday, May 10, 2011 8:13:36 AM UTC-5, Michael wrote:

Has anyone seen real world gain with the Lazy H on 10 meters verses a
dipole? My experience shows it consistently lags behind the 1/2 wave
dipole even through the Lazy H is 10+ feet higher than the dipole.

I also built an extended double zepp for 10 meters with a 450 matching
section to a 1:1 balun and then to coax, and the extended double zepp
consistently out performs the dipole in it's preferred direction.

I've never tried one, so can't say from experience.
But that you have to use extreme tuner settings to match
the system tells me you may be seeing a good amount of loss.
And then you have the issues Richard mentioned on top of that.
The coax fed dipole is very efficient. Very little system loss
involved. So even if it had less directional gain, it's possible
that gain could be offset by matching losses. Or even driven
negative if the loss was extreme.
Compare the two on a dead frequency just listening to noise.
If the H seems real quiet compared to the dipole, I would
suspect excess tuner loss. If they are about the same, may be
other issues.

The only phased dipoles I ever ran were parallel horizontal
dipoles. I would steer the pattern by changing the phasing.
Usually by adding lengths of feed line. It worked pretty well.
That was on 40m.. *But as mentioned, there is only so much
blood that can be squeezed from two elements, even if configured
in an optimum manner, say as with a yagi or whatever. *:/

I rebuilt the center fed Lazy H twice with different pieces of 450
ladder line, and I installed it in two different locations. I used two
different antenna tuners. I built it exactly as specified in the ARRL
antenna handbook. Both times the antenna exhibited a high SWR and
poor performance compared to a mono band dipole for the same frequency
and at about the same height. I suspect the underling problem may be
too many arm chair antenna experts plugging their designs in to
computer antenna modeling software, and not enough people actually
going out in the backyard and building the antenna and comparing it's
performance to a real world dipole for the same frequency. There are
many web pages touting the supposed gain of the Lazy H with EZNEC
plots posted as supporting evidence, but real world performance has
shown that it is consistently out performed by a plain old dipole.
I was able to make contacts with the Lazy H, and I did get some good
reports with it. However, when I switched to the plain old wire
dipole the dipole was consistently the stronger performer. I have not
tried the end fed Lazy H design with a 180 degree twist and the 1/4
wave matching stub yet.

Michael Rawls
KS4HY