[CVCC] Fwd: [FOC] W4PM river station and antenna

[HOWARD MOTLEY]

> ---------- Original Message ----------
>     From: HOWARD MOTLEY <hmmjr at comcast.net>
>     To: FOC Members <foc_members at googlegroups.com>
>     Date: June 16, 2020 at 10:04 AM
>     Subject: [FOC] W4PM river station and antenna
> 
>     I've mentioned before that I recently took my old Ten Tec OMNI D series B to our river cottage.  Our place is about 100 yards SW of the Rappahannock River (over 1 mile wide) next to a small wet lands.  I have no room for an antenna even as long as a 40 meter dipole!  So I tried a MFJ 40/20 trap dipole which started out at 46' long.  I suspended it from an over hanging pine tree limb about 40 feet up down at about a 30 to 45 degree angle to a post driven into that wet land sloping to the NE.  I tried the WPX contest but soon found the antenna was grossly mistuned 700 kHz to 1 MHz low.  I did make 120 contacts - a good number from EU but with a mismatch that severe I was lucky to get any power radiated at all.
> 
>     SO this past weekend,  armed with a antenna analyzer and a good pair of rubber boots, I headed back to the river to tune that antenna.  I trudged through that wet land more times than I'd like to recall and had to cut a total of 4 feet off the 20 meter central section to get it resonant (0 J) at the low end of 20 meters. Even after removing that much wire it was still tuned low on 40.  So I took off another 3 feet (18" per side) from the 40 meter ends.  That brought it to resonance at the bottom of the 40 meter band!  The antenna now covers all of the 20 meter band with less than a 2:1 SWR and on 40 meters it has a SWR band width of maybe 100 kHZ.  That's good enough because that covers the CW portion of the band where I hang out!  That 46' long antenna is now about 39' long!  I did not get a chance to test it on the air because I forgot to take a keyer with me so I did not set the rig up.  I was not going to send CW by tapping two wires together!  Stay tuned next weekend for W4PM/p from Essex county VA.
> 
>     Yesterday I built a keyer kit so I could leave one at the river. It works great.  More on that in the next e-mail.
> 
>     73,
>     Puck
> 





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