[Elecraft] Verticals

[Stuart Rohre]

Ed and the group,
You have your experience with the vertical, and I had just the opposite.  I
always have a better signal with the Gap Titan, and no parts coming off,
than my friend, whose R5 had bad traps and hardware fell off because of the
poor design of the base mounting kept coming loose in wind. My Titan has
been better than previous Hy Gain, and Butternut HF 6.

Try getting much help from C. the maker of the R5!  They finally did replace
some traps on R7's that were faulty, but had the problems recur in later
models. They have been less than forthcoming until the owner of the R7 used
electronic lab equipment to demo to them they had a bad trap.

I have had trouble with Hy Gain verticals durability, with Cushcraft, and
with Butternut parts breaking.  They had a run of bad ceramic capacitors at
one time, and the head of the company confirmed that to our ham club.
Things happen to any company.  If it happens well out of the normal
warranty, it is pretty hard for the company to get the capacitor
manufacturer to not say the unit was exposed to too high winds, moisture or
other mitigating factor.  Hams think antennas should weather hurricanes, but
most of them would be unaffordable if they were built to do that year in and
year out.

Most antenna problems come from hams not following directions to the letter,
or doing poor soldering, or defying the laws of physics as applied to
antennas.

Verticals are NOT designed to work short skip, like TX to NM.  Mine does
sometimes and I am thrilled when it does.  But, on the whole, any vertical
worth its design is going to give you the lower angles of long skip, or DX
skip.  Any antenna will sometime work at angles other than its angle of
maximum take off, and give propagation at some distance that is not its
strong point.  A dipole or doublet would work next state over better than a
vertical.  Check out the angles of take off and the resulting distances that
are covered.  NO SINGLE ANTENNA is optimum for all conditions of operation.
I usually have a multi band wire antenna as well as any others.

When I ordered my Gap, UPS mishandled it, and lost out half of the hardware.
I filed a claim with UPS as required, and notified Gap, and they sent the
missing hardware by return mail.  All they asked was for copies of the claim
forms to UPS.  I later found out, that since it was summer, UPS used student
workers, who did not know that UPS conveyor sorting is not for all their
packages and longer boxes were to be hand sorted.  Luckily I knew someone at
UPS who followed up on the claim and found out what happened.  UPS had
retaped the package, and did not admit to a problem at time of initial
delivery.  When they came out and inspected the damaged package, they
admitted it had been resealed and it was their fault.  The antenna went
together without tuning and met all specs.  It is elevated six feet off the
ground in the middle of the yard, and has worked so well on DX there, I
never moved it to a higher pole.  Yes, my neighbor who had a sixty foot
tower heard louder signals than I do, but at optimum times of the
propagation day, I work the same DX he does.  You just listen, listen,
listen, and bide your time, and it can be done.

I have placed our club in the top ten in class at Field Day with nothing
more than wire Zepps and giant horizontal loops up only 20 feet for the
loops and 30 feet for the Zepps.  With antennas, of simple wires, size
matters greatly, and loops of 1.25 waves on 160m really have gain on the
high bands.  Same for the Double Zepps.  Inverting Vee style, their modeled
lobes seem to fill in, and give omni directional good Field Day coverage.
We worked more stations with the Zepps or Loops than with a tribander beam
on Field Day, over several years at the same site, with antennas situated
the same.
Capture areas dominate in that particular competition.  Putting antennas too
high, causes long skip to dominate their performance which is fine for DX
contests, poor for working the midwest.

It is pretty clear from the description of the badly soldered coax and
connector that it kept the vertical from working properly, and the solder
job is the key to many antenna successes.

73,
Stuart K5KVH