[Elecraft] Portable Antennas (Is there an "easy" button?)

[stan levandowski]

Don, that's my antenna and I shot that video with Tony W1ZMB.  All we 
wanted to do was publicize a rather inexpensive and workable alternative 
to those heavily marketed and very expensive shortened antennas that 
promise the world at your doorstep and often fall short.

I used that antenna to earn my QRP WAC Award.  My club borrowed it for a 
recent Special Event conducted from the front porch of Samuel F.B. 
Morse's Poughkeepsie estate.  They didn't want us to put big antennae 
all over the place.  For that event we poured 100 watts into it.  Seemed 
to work quite well. We used an ICOM 746PRO which is known to have a 
rather narrow internal tuner -- I've been told 3:1.

In any case, Don (et al), a half wave end fed antenna is basically a 
pretty good deal and it works darn well *above* half wave also.  Putting 
it on a pushup pole, using a transformer to bring the impedance down to 
where *most* tuners can find a match, having a small footprint, and 
eliminating radials at the halfwave frequency and above (i.e., 20 
through 6 meters inclusive) isn't a bad deal, in my opinion, for the ham 
who may be operating under certain constraints and wants something 
better than a 10% efficient Hamstick.

I apologize if the technical content of our video was either lacking or 
misleading to anyone.  We just know the darn thing works from actual 
experience.

73, Stan WB2LQF


On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 4:51 PM, Don Wilhelm wrote:


> Yes, that video is woefully uninformative, all that was accomplished 
> was to demonstrate that the K2 tuner could tune it - note that the K2 
> tuner has a very wide range.