[Lowfer] A couple of crude Antenna Matching techniques - will either one work

[John Bruce McCreath]

Hi Andy….can you clarify a few things for me.  Is the bottom end of your coil grounded, is the capacitor
in parallel with the coil, are you tapping the feed line inner conductor near the bottom end of the loading
coil, and is its shield connected to the bottom of the coil/cap?  If that’s the case, you should be able to
bring it all to resonance with the meters you have.  I wouldn’t put an RF ammeter at the top end of the
loading coil, as it could really throw things off because of the high voltage there.  The antenna current
should be the same, regardless of whether it’s measured at the “cold” or “hot” ends of the coil.  Do you
have a means of measuring the transmitter final current?

By comparison, here is how I resonated EAR’s antenna.  The loading coil has a built-in variometer for
adjusting resonance.  I put a current-transformer type RF ammeter on the ground end of the coil and
watched for a peak while I rotated the inner coil of the variometer.  To match the final to the loading
coil/variometer, I used a three turn link coil wound over the very bottom turns and moved it around
while watching for a dip in the final current.

73, J.B., VE3EAR

LowFER Beacon "EAR"
188.830 kHz. QRSS30
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