[Elecraft] Antenna?

[Mike Morrow]

Jeff Imel wrote:

> The HF Pack organization sponsors and annual antenna shootout... 
> http://tinyurl.com/2lzgm

That is a pretty interesting site.  Thanks for the URL.

It confirms the very dismal performance of *all* those "popular" HF short loading-coil verticals in comparison to the most simple, basic, inexpensive quarter-wave vertical.  TANSTAAFL!

Likewise, the horizontal antenna comparisons confirm the overall superiority of a simple dipole over other horizontal types being tested.

A comparison of all tested horizontal and vertical antennas against the half-wave horizontal dipole would have been interesting.  I'm sure it would have shown a very significant advantage of a horizontal dipole over any vertical tested.

At campsites I've made several side-by-side tests of various verticals versus a resonant dipole and have *always* found found verticals to be very poor performers, when directly compared to a cheap horizontal dipole.  Plus, don't forget the counterpoise or ground required by the vertical.  

If one chooses to use a multi-band dipole for portable operation, I'd suggest staying away from *trap* dipoles.  Aside from the traps being heavy and bulky, the traps really narrow the bandwidth of each band compared to that of a single band dipole.  That's why, for the seven-band portable dipole that I put together,  I use small, lightweight, home-made PVC insulators with manually connected jumpers around them to change the band of resonance.

The second-best portable antenna I've ever used was a random-length dipole, center fed with 450 ohm ladder twin lead and a tuner.  The main problem presented was the routing of the excess twin lead.  Every camp site is different, and it *does* make a difference if you coil up the excess or allow it to lay on the ground.  The resonant dipole allowed me to return to the joyful and trouble-free world of RG-8X coax!  Also, most small tuners aren't real balanced line tuners, so there are losses in the ferrite balun that nearly all such tuners use to support balanced line feed.

I think I'm going to build a light-weight four-band version of my portable dipole for the four bands on my K1.  Right now, I just use the seven-band version that I originally built for my old TS-50S.

73,
Mike / KK5F