37 QSO's, 4 continents.
The week started slow with HF bands sounding like someone had thrown a blanket over them, so nothing much going on Saturday or Sunday. Compared to Museum Ships on the Air weekend, it was quiet as a library.
On Monday afternoon I had it in mind to improve on my 40M end-fed half-wave antenna. While it was "pretty good," I thought I could get better results.The EFHW needs a short path to ground, but my shack is on the second floor, so that wasn't happening. I also wanted something more readily multi-band. Some searching and researching eventually led me to 1936 and an article in the March QST magazine about "An Unorthodox Antenna." The short of it is this: an 84-foot long end-fed wire and a 17 foot "counterpoise" connected via 4:1 current-type balun/unun, will work on all HF bands when used with an antenna tuner. It's not resonant, so you must use a tuner, but with a tuner it works on all bands. Lucky for me, the G90 has an internal, automatic antenna tuner, so bob's your uncle.
I measured out the lengths of wire, connected them to a balun I had in the junk box (every Ham and every tinkering man has a junk box. If you don't, cut a corner off your man-card). The long wire is (mostly) horizontal out to the back fence, between 30 and 7 feet off the ground. I'll be improving the sloping end in the coming days. The 17 foot part is meant to dangle vertically, so...it does.
With just the coarse measurements, it works fantastically well. First thing I did was tune to the 160 Meter band and hit the tuner. It tuned up in an amazingly short time, and through the magic of web-sdr's, I know I am getting out at least to Kansas City on the "Top Band."
I haven't been able to make objective or subjective side-by-side comparisons with the delta loop yet, but I have an antenna A-B-C switch coming soon that will allow for such testing. The loop is amazingly quiet on receive, and its peak is quite high in the trees. The W3EDP is noisier and lower. The height of the loop is a 2-edged sword. First, it's good because height is great. The more, the better. But the downside is that when the wind starts to blow over 10MpH, the top of that tree starts swaying, which causes stretching and abrasion and a general risk of snapping the wire. This risk is mitigated by disconnecting the nearest lower corner of the triangle and letting it hang without tension. The W3EDP does not suffer from such dynamics because it's lower, and the tree it relies on is much less prone to movement at that height. More testing is needed to compare their characteristics.
With the W3EDP antenna, I worked the Netherlands with 1 watt using FT8. That's amazing.
Late in the week, Thursday night, I had been working some CW and switched to FT8. The duty cycle and current draw of these modes led to the melting of my power-supply connector. Ha. It was a cheapy and not a good permanent station PS, so I had planned and ordered a "real" power supply earlier in the week. It will be here Saturday, so there was only one day of down time. Lucky, again!
If we QSO'd, thanks! If we didn't, I hope we do soon.
73!
"This week [...]" is a summary of Radio-related activity from Saturday through Friday.
