What the hell?

I managed to get some time to read more of this month's Practical Wireless during the past evening.  

On the cover is a picture of something that looks like the tail of a kite.  It's actually an antenna wire sewn into some plastic fabric that slides over a telescopic fishing pole, making a multiband end-fed.

They call it...the Bantenna.   Oooohh!

The review, which somehow manages to stretch to two pages, says that the sleeve design might help to make onlookers less suspicious of your radio activities. 

Well, if putting up a 7m fishing pole isn't suspicious enough for the suspiciously-minded, then sticking a bright red sleeve over it (black also available(!)) is hardly going to make them turn away and go 'oh, it's just harmless radio, pour the wine, Donald'.

Of course, it gets worse.

Asking price for a (probably) 9:1 unun with a bit of wire and some material over it?  

£125 if you want a pole with it. £95 if you don't.

Arrrrrrgghhhh!!!  

A toroid for a 9:1 costs roughly £7 for a decent one.  Maybe a couple of metres of enamelled wire for the windings, add another £3, maximum.  Connectors?  Well, those can be just auto spade types, costing almost nothing, and that we all have anyway.  You don't need a plastic box over the unun, but it might set you back all of £3 if you really had to get one.

7m of wire: roughly £7, if you bought some decent kevlar-cored stuff that doesn't tangle.  Most of us already have junk wire.  Bantenna Man calls this 'feed wire', when it's actually the radiator.  It's also the first time I've seen a radiator wire connector on the same side of the unun box as the coax connector - not such a good idea when the current maximum is as close as you could make it to the coax input.

Also note the use of a forked spade connector for the radiator.  Anyone who has worked radio in the field will know these are generally a bad idea, because they easily work themselves loose when there is any mechanical movement going on (such as a wildly flapping fishing pole!)  Don't copy this man: use ring connectors that can't pull themselves out.

Now the big cost: the telescopic pole, which have gone up substantially in price: now about £20.

Let's add all that up, and we get: £37.  You can just tape, hang, or cable tie the wire to the pole.  The sleeve idea seems to me, from the monumentally crap video (below), to be more of a headache than if it were not there.

You can in fact buy (if you want to buy anything) the same type of end-fed antenna from the Hawaii Emergency Radio Club for only a bit more - $56 - and, I can testify, is well worth considering for a basic, portable multiband solution, even if it's not the best antenna in the world.

What a total joke!  £125 for a simple end-fed antenna.  The only thing that Bantenna's owner should put a sleeve over is his microphone, because in his advertising video online, you hear more of the wind than his hot air about the antenna.  The man also can't spell: "Imagine an antenna that hides in plain site [sic]".  

Unsurprisingly, the owner tells us on his site: "We are not VAT registered, we don't have to be".  That's because he doesn't (and probably never will) make enough money from his wire-in-a-sleeve to require VAT registration (currently £70,000 per annum).