Tuesday, 3 September 2019

How low can you go?

The autumn evenings are rapidly closing in on us now.  Being a little bored, and perhaps thinking a little of those poor people in the Bahamas being flattened by Hurricane Dorian, I wondered: 'can I get out with a wire antenna just thrown on the ground?'

For this, I just unrolled 10m of wire attached to a 9:1 balun - a multi-band end-fed antenna, and laid it on the ground.  I fed it with about 15-20W RF, and sent out a few CQs on FT8, to see what the reports looked like.

I think the results are quite remarkable, and certainly more than good enough to produce QSOs out to reasonable distances.  At 40m, I even managed to get a -18dB signal across the Atlantic!

So, if you have rubbish neighbours, a windy location, or some other restriction on erecting a tall antenna, these new digimodes really do allow you to continue your hobby effectively, regardless.

I think this might prompt a lot more experimentation!

Results at 40m; terminator correct at time of transmissions.


80m results.
Results at 60m.

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1 comment:

  1. PE4BAS, Bas4 September 2019 at 07:04

    You would be surprised to see what some stations achieve with just a dipole in the attic and QRP power (5W or less). Did you have the wire outside or inside the house? Next step....dig the wire into the ground ;-) 73, Bas

    ReplyDelete

Polite, constructive comment only. Any nonsense won't make it any further...

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