[Elecraft] Antenna for Travels?

[Jim Brown]

An OT I chatted with on 2m a few weeks ago told me his solution -- a
collapsible fly fishing pole strung with wire. He said he had traveled
all over the world with it and found it to be quite effective,
especially with suitable loading coils for the lower frequency bands
and a decent ground. My fertile imagination took that one step further
(but my fingers haven't yet implemented it -- find some small diameter
stranded wire that is flexible enough to be wound onto a fly reel,
along with some fishing weights and some objects that can be used as
insulators. Buy a lot of the wire, so you can leave it on site when you
move on if need be (for example, when it isn't practical to pull it out
of a tree).  Then use the fly rod/reel combo as a launch vehicle. Two
of these rigs gives you a dipole, sort of. :) 

You could also use the rod as a vertical by placing it in a suitable
rod holder, then adding radials and, if practical, a loading coil.
Several builders have noted the usefullness of plumbing pipe couplers
as forms for antenna coils and traps. In the old days, we used simple
objects like oatmeal boxes and the center forms for toilet paper rolls.
  

In these times, any antenna rig that we take on an airplane has got to
look simple enough to get past the security checkpoint. My guess is
that this sort of rig at least has a chance of doing so. I can't
imagine the Isotron passing that hurdle.

Jim K9YC

On Tue, 30 Dec 2003 10:38:51 -0600, Mike Morrow wrote:

>Why not a simple wire dipole, if such an antenna can be installed where you
>are going?