[AMRadio] 160 Meter Antenna

[Thomas F. Giella KN4LF]

Jim,

It all depends what you want to accomplish on 160 meters.

An inverted V with a feedpoint at 80 feet above ground will be an NVIS 90 
degree TOA antenna which will allow for rag chewing out to approximately 500 
miles. As an inverted V the ends should be high enough so that a animals and 
people can't run into them. Also high enough so that at the feedpoint the 
wires are no closer than 90-120 degrees apart from each other to prevent RF 
signal cancellation.

If you feed the inverted V with coax you may see a bandwidth of 
approximately 50 kc. You can then use a tee network antenna tuner to fool 
your rig or linear amplifier so as to be able to operate across more of the 
band with some loss. With window line and a balanced link coupled antenna 
tuner you can operate across all 200 kc of the band with virtually no loss.

I use 300 ohm window line on my 160-10 meter full wave horizontal loop and 
bring it into the radio shack via a piece of 1" x 4" oak board with banana 
jacks through it. You want to keep the window line at least twice it's width 
away from metal to reduce interaction, so running it through metal conduit 
and parallel to other feed lines would not be good.

A good compromise antenna for DXing and rag chewing is the 1/4 wave inverted 
L. I have a website on the 1/4 wave inverted L at 
http://www.kn4lf.com/kn4lf97.htm .

73 & GUD DX,
Thomas F. Giella, KN4LF
Lakeland, FL, USA
kn4lf at arrl.net

KN4LF Amateur & SWL Radio Autobiography: http://www.kn4lf.com