[FARC] Hamsticks - opinions please

[David Matthews]

Hi Joe -

For MEPN, an NVIS antenna may be your best bet, since the stations 
you're trying to hit are well within a 300 mile radius.  If you're not 
already familiar with NVIS, you can get a brief description at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Vertical_Incidence_Skywave

Some web sties describing NVIS operation may specify various "ideal" 
heights and dimensions, but the key thing is that you're just trying to 
get some RF to go nearly straight up.  In practice, any wire of 
reasonable length that's mostly horizontal and placed within a few feet 
of ground level will probably do just fine as long as you have a way to 
match the weird load impedance. 

I used to live in a townhouse where I needed to use a stealth antenna.  
So, the transmitter fed an MFJ-949 tuner that fed about 40 ft of coax 
which then connected to an end-fed 35 ft. wire that I stapled under the 
top plate of a 6' wood privacy fence.  As an NVIS antenna this worked 
surprisingly well for 40 and 80 meter contacts in the MD/VA/WVA/PA/DE 
area (even using QRP).  A downside of this was having a lot of RF on the 
shield of the coax, which occasionally caused some RF problems for other 
equipment.  This was solved by getting an Icom AH-4 autotuner and 
mounting it outside.

Here's a link to a map, updated every 5 minutes, that shows the current 
maximum frequency that will support an NVIS contact:
    http://www.spacew.com/www/fof2.html

Although the ideal is for stations on both sides of the contact to have 
NVIS antennas, more often than not, just having it on one side of the 
path works fine.  A side benefit of using an NVIS antenna is that it 
will typically drop your received noise level quite a bit.... a very 
useful property on 80 meters during the summer months.


73 de K3MV


Joseph M. Durnal wrote:
> I'm going to try and make a last ditch effort to get on 75 meters from
> my town house....