[Qcwa] Hidden Antennas

Sun, 17 Feb 2002 19:33:50 -0700

Good recommendation.  

I use an SGC 230 auto tuner with such a set up and it works great, if the
pole is over 24' tall and you have a decent counterpoise or ground system
you can work down to 160 meter with the 230.  They have a shightly cheaper
tuner with no case for just over $200.  Great tuner can retune in 10uS or
less.  You can install a fiberglass pole and put a copper pipe up the
center to feed it as a hot element instead of shunt feeding.  Mine is shunt
feed but I have a much taller pole very well grounded.  It is a 96 foot 15
KW wind generator tower, but I find that I can load a 24 foot vertical
cable just as well as a hot element.  

This tuner can load a folded dipole in the attic very well.  This tuner has
a much wider match than most of the built in tuners so it can tune better
with wilder elements than they can.  I have expermented with mine a great
deal and it can load a wet noodle, but very poor radiation from such.  

I loaded a metal rain gutter at my office with the same type tuner, did not
have good counterpoise, so it was goosey on 80 and 40 but on 14 Mhz and
higher it worked great.    

73

rick k5ric

At 12:13 PM 2/16/02 -0600, you wrote:
>How about a flag pole in the front yard.  Make sure it has a good ground
>and some radials.  Run a shunt wire up the pole and tap on.   A matching
>network at the bottom will make it look like 50 ohms.  You may have to
>use a shunt wire for each band depending on what the impedance looks
>like where you tap on.  It ought to work real well on 30, 40 and Ok on
>80 and possibly on 20 if the length of the pole is not over 5/8 wave,
>though ground losses will be higher at that frequency.  Should work
>nearly as well as a full size vertical on 30 and 40.
>-- 
>73 de K5RW, Neal McEwen, at "The Telegraph Office", [email protected]
>         A WWW Page for Telegraph Key Collectors and Historians
>             http://www.metronet.com/~nmcewen/tel_off.html
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