Although it's nicely made and robust, it isn't the easiest antenna to match properly. Having had very good results with a simple SlimJim on 2m SSB over the weekend, I decided to spend an hour today pulling the 70cm elements off the Sandpiper Yagi, and getting a perfect match on 2m.
Eventually, I managed to get a good, flat SWR across the 2m band, down at 1.05:1 at 144.174MHz, the FT8 area.
The antenna isn't very high above local ground - only 3.5m - but we are already 100m up, with sloping ground all the way to the Irish Sea in the direction of the USA.
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| Beam direction of the USA. A bigger antenna is required (possibly!) |
I was surprised to find that HFTA terrain modelling yields 19.5dBi total gain at extremely low angles for this simple 3-ele Yagi. That takes a modest 25W input into an effective 2.2kW output!
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| If signals arrive at very low angles, I'm your station! |
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