2022-04-27

30m Wire Antenna Update.

 The 30m long piece of wire has found its place for a while.

The feed point is placed 2m high at the end of the out-house under an apple tree. It then goes up through the tree and lead to the second apple tree - the largest in the garden, then down to a smaller tree where the end is attached. Most of the wire is about 5m above ground, not particularly high, but definitely better than 1m above ground. 

The antenna now has a counterpoise added, about 50m of wire, about 2m above ground (and lower).

The system works nicely on 30m, and does not need a tuner when operating from 80 - 6m. On the resonant bands of the dipole, the dipole mostly works better, but on 20m in particular the wire gives signal mostly equal to the dipole. On 30m the dipole is useless, as it is not resonant at all, and the wire works nicely. A TZ station (Mali) was coming in nicely with up to S9 signals, but 5W was (as expected) not sufficient to break the pile -up. I will have to try again when signals are good, and less stations are calling.

The present set-up of antennas and transceivers for the 80 - 4m bands is now as follows.

IC-705:  Wire antenna, workable on all bands 80m - 6m.

IC-7300: Dipole working on 4,6,10,15,20,40,80m

IC-7600: The old R-6000 antenna running 10-12-15-17-20m, and the 6m part of the V-2000 antenna.

IC-7100: A vertical Sirio half wave antenna for 4m, mostly used for the local FM traffic.

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