[QCWA] Some thoughts on the terminated folded dipole.

[Jeffrey D Angus]

The Navy likes to make things simple.

Back in the late '40s the Navy developed a broad band HF antenna.
News of this was published in QST.

As some have called it, "A squashed Rhombic" in that the feed
point and far termination were brought much closer together.

It is basically a folded dipole, with the addition to a resistive
termination on the opposite side of the feed point.

It was mentioned also in 73 and CQ magazine and again in QST.

However, all of them used the original formula for length and
spacing of the dipole elements.

Fitting an antenna to the space available, I got 120' overall length
and 43.5" spacing for the elements.

It was horrible. generally the VSWR was greater than 25:1 over
the entire range it was supposed to work at with maybe a couple
of dips down to 3:1.

I looked to see who was actually selling this antenna pre-assembled.
Buxcom, B&W and a couple of others have them for sale.

Oddly enough, the spacing for these are between 12 to 16 inches.
A difference of 3 or 4 to one.

Changing the spacing on mine down to 12" seems to made a huge
improvement.

Which just goes to show, bad information gets propagated repeatedly.

Jeff-1.0
wa6fwi