[Antennas] Help on 5-BTV radials

[David W Sher]

Radials are a must.  They do not need to be straight, although I wouldn't
fold the longest (80 or 40 M) radials completely back on themselves; you
can make a right angle turn in the middle or so.

Band width on 80 will be ca. 50-75 KHz for a 2:1 SWR.  You can get a good
match on all bands with proper tuning; 40 will probably give you a
100-150 KHz bandwidth, the others should cover all the band.  This is
based on measurements I made with my Butternut HF-6V and HF-9V antennas
using a MFJ analyzer.  If you have modern all solid state finals, they
will generally have foldback circuits which will protect them; the
exception is Ten-Tec which uses very rugged finals which don't need it. 
Try to get an inexpensive tuner MFJ, etc. possibly a used one on eBay or
at a hamfest.  If you have a tube final (2 x 6146, like Kenwood TS-830)
you have nothing to worry about.

Dave    W9LYA
Sometimes a cigar is only a cigar.  S. Freud

On Wed, 5 Oct 2005 00:41:22 -0500 Cesar Gamez <cgamezt at gmail.com> writes:
> Hi,
>  I'm new into ham radio, although done CB DX'ing some years ago 
> (70's &
> 80's).
> Hope somebody can give me some hints or help.
> I've finally decided to put up a 5-BTV Hustler Vertical (resonator 
> tuned)
> antenna on my base. I've just got the antenna and planning to set it 
> up next
> weekend.
> The antenna will lie on top of a 12 meter mast, sitting on my roof 
> (2
> stories high).
>  The antenna manual clearly specifies putting up radials (2 for each 
> band
> minimum); but these are extremely long on the low freq. bands and 
> since I'm
> in a pretty small footprint house in a residential area, I'm not 
> sure what
> options I may have.
>  My questions/ideas are:
> 1. No radials: the mast is not planned to be grounded, I'm afraid of 
> severe
> intereference at home and neighbors, even if using the ugly 1:1 
> balun
> recommendation.
> 2. Attach 10m band radials (shortest, about 8 feet long): I will be 
> using a
> lot the antenna on 10m band locally, up to 100km distance radius 
> max.,
> although I'm also interested in the DX use. I'm wondering if the 10m 
> will
> help the multiples (20m, 40m and 80m bands) at all.
> 3. What frequency on 80m should I tune the antenna (for a newbie, 
> like me?)
> apparently the resonator has a tight tolerance on this.
> 4. What is the max. recommended SWR for safe transmission without 
> burning
> the equipment? I don't have a tuner, just a SWR meter and will 
> transmit max.
> 100W.
>  Thanks for your help.
>  Regards, Cesar.
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