John Beckman - W4BTX HAM RADIO "A PAST TIME FOR A LIFETIME"
Antennas. I fon't suppose there is anything that is so "mysterious" as Antennas. And tons of misinformation about them is used to confuse, especailly new hams,. I've often said I could tak a 40 foot piene of aluminum pipe, weld some doo dads on it, and makea fortune selling it as the SUPER DUPER ALL BAND KILLER ANTEANNA. And so many hams are suckered into that scaem it is outrageous.
When I started in this hobby almost eveery ham built their transmitters. And they all had a tank circuit (a final stage) which was link coupled to open wire feeders and a half wve dipole or a Zepp anenna. I remember when I bought my first commercail xmtr. It was a Johhson Viking II kit that I built on the kitchen table. I as using a folded diple at the time made of 300 ohm TV wire. The Viking had a So-239 coax connector on it. But I had an antenna with a twin-lead feed line. What was I t odo? Not knowing any better, I soldeered one side ofthe twen-lead into the the center of a PL-259 and the other side to the "shell." I screwed taht onto the Viking. And it worked! (The Viking had a pi network ouput wahich would match almost anything.)
Antennas are no big daal. Use an antenna tuner (actually a couler) between your transcevier and a full wave loop, or an extened Zepp and forget "resonance." The transceiver doesn't care what you hook up to it as long as it see a nominal 50 ohms and the tuner will do the job. .
One of my favorites is a enter-fed Zepp fed with open wire or "windo line" thru a tuner. You didn;t even have to measure the lengths of wie as long as they are longer than a half awave on the lowest band you planned to use and are equal length.
The best wire anteanna I have ever used is the full-wave 80 meter loop I have now. It is simply 273 feet of wire in a loop fed with window line. Thru a tuner I can use it on all 80-10 bands and it is as good on 20 meters as my old tri-bnnd beam. Check out the "Loop Skywire" on this site. It doesn't have to be square, it can be a triangle or rectangle.. It is simple and cheap and it works. And isn't that what you eant an anteanna to do?
Don't waste your money on commercail gimmick antennas. Keep it simple, save money, and have fun.
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