[Elecraft] New KX3 up & running.

[Fred Jensen]

Nor have I.  I had a full-up BP for several years and discovered that, 
despite pictures of various configurations ... arms out, up, down, in a 
Vee, one up/one down ... there really were only two configurations -- 
horizontal and vertical.  In the horiz mode, it's an OCF short loaded 
dipole which never worked well for me.  I had better results [mainly on 
SOTA summits] with a vertical ground plane configuration using two of 
the long telescoping whips as radials.  It is very well made and durable.

Tuning was a bear, essentially non-repeatable, so all the "recipe's" I 
came up with for each band didn't help much.  The full kit weighed in at 
about a dozen pounds.  Setup took a minimum of 30 min, usually more.

I finally sold it and got an Alexloop for almost exactly what I got for 
the BP.  1.4 lbs, sets up in about 5 min, quite insensitive to ground 
and surrounding objects, and works very well.  It's not really large 
enough on 40 and the BW is barely enough for a SSB signal, but it has 
proven to be very usable in field environments, especially on 20 and up. 
  It's a bit "spendy" as the Oregonians say, you can build one much more 
cheaply, I'm just lazy.  It too is very well made.

Many of the SOTA folks use EFHW wires.  Extremely light, lots of support 
options.

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the Cal QSO Party 1-2 Oct 2016
- www.cqp.org

On 5/3/2016 9:42 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
> On Tue,5/3/2016 9:28 PM, lstavenhagen wrote:
>> But even so, the Buddipole is one of the best ham radio investments
>> you'll find you've made,
>
> I've never understood the logic of that -- lightweight, easy to support
> antennas that are more effective are a lot cheaper.
>
> 73, Jim K9YC