Hi all......
I have a ground mounted 40 ft vertical wth an extensive buried radial system
that I have been using with good success on 40 thru 10 meters and have been
feeding it with 50 ohm coax to a 4 to 1 voltage balun at the base of the
antenna.
I recently tried feeding the antenna with 450 ohm twin lead and a Johnson
Matchbox with the twin lead parallel to the ground at about 6 inches
elevation.
I am pretty gratified to find the Matchbox will do a fine job of balancing
and matching on 80 thru 10 meters.

Anyone else try this?

I haven't tried feeding an unbalanced antenna with balanced line before,
unless there is a balun at the feedpoint of the antenna...have always
thought balanced line will only feed a balanced antenna....the exception
being an end fed zepp, or a 30 ft vertical with one 30 ft counterpose.

On Mon, 4 Apr 2005 13:06:59 -0700, "denton"
wrote:

Hi all......
I have a ground mounted 40 ft vertical wth an extensive buried radial system
that I have been using with good success on 40 thru 10 meters and have been
feeding it with 50 ohm coax to a 4 to 1 voltage balun at the base of the
antenna.
I recently tried feeding the antenna with 450 ohm twin lead and a Johnson
Matchbox with the twin lead parallel to the ground at about 6 inches
elevation.
I am pretty gratified to find the Matchbox will do a fine job of balancing
and matching on 80 thru 10 meters.

Anyone else try this?

I haven't tried feeding an unbalanced antenna with balanced line before,
unless there is a balun at the feedpoint of the antenna...have always
thought balanced line will only feed a balanced antenna....the exception
being an end fed zepp, or a 30 ft vertical with one 30 ft counterpose.


Dear Denton,

This is not to say that it will not be a problem in some way. You get
away with it primarily because the tuner end of the balanced line is
connecting only to the link - therefore floating (except for some
capacitive coupling from the link to the tank circuit).

To a large degree, the fact that the ground plane antenna is very much
unbalance, the twinlead doesn't have any way of knowing this and
doesn't care.




Bob, W9DMK, Dahlgren, VA
Replace "nobody" with my callsign for e-mail
http://www.qsl.net/w9dmk
http://zaffora/f2o.org/W9DMK/W9dmk.html

"denton" wrote in message
...
Hi all......
I have a ground mounted 40 ft vertical wth an extensive buried radial
system
that I have been using with good success on 40 thru 10 meters and have
been
feeding it with 50 ohm coax to a 4 to 1 voltage balun at the base of the
antenna.
I recently tried feeding the antenna with 450 ohm twin lead and a Johnson
Matchbox with the twin lead parallel to the ground at about 6 inches
elevation.
I am pretty gratified to find the Matchbox will do a fine job of balancing
and matching on 80 thru 10 meters.

Anyone else try this?

I haven't tried feeding an unbalanced antenna with balanced line before,
unless there is a balun at the feedpoint of the antenna...have always
thought balanced line will only feed a balanced antenna....the exception
being an end fed zepp, or a 30 ft vertical with one 30 ft counterpose.

..
I've used twin lead to feed a vertical, but I used a balun on each end of
the twin lead to convert it to 50-ish ohms or so for both ends. It saved a
ton of money because it was a long run.

I think he has re-invented the multi band ground plane...hi.

Dan/W4NTI

"denton" wrote in message
...
Hi all......
I have a ground mounted 40 ft vertical wth an extensive buried radial
system that I have been using with good success on 40 thru 10 meters and
have been feeding it with 50 ohm coax to a 4 to 1 voltage balun at the
base of the antenna.
I recently tried feeding the antenna with 450 ohm twin lead and a Johnson
Matchbox with the twin lead parallel to the ground at about 6 inches
elevation.
I am pretty gratified to find the Matchbox will do a fine job of balancing
and matching on 80 thru 10 meters.

Anyone else try this?

I haven't tried feeding an unbalanced antenna with balanced line before,
unless there is a balun at the feedpoint of the antenna...have always
thought balanced line will only feed a balanced antenna....the exception
being an end fed zepp, or a 30 ft vertical with one 30 ft counterpose.

i am currently enstalling a 46 foot twin verticle, 2 46 foot verticles
only inches apart, that are connected together at the bottom with a
single lead. The top of each verticle is connected to 500+ feet of
copper wire that is arranged in an irregular circle with about 5o feet
separation of each end point. One end is the feed with the same wire
carefully brought into shack without touching structure. I used an
insulated sink (or toilet not sure) tube with copper inside and
fiberglass covering. I am hoping the shielding will keep TVI down?
The average height of the wire is at 50 ft so basically I spliced the
verticles into the rombick shaped longwire. Reception is great but I
have a couple of tests and tweaks to do today before I am willing to
put a load (rf) on the wire. I will report back as soon as I get some
numbers. 73 Scotty ke5to