It’s been a while since I last posted. I’ve been busy working on a website for my church that you can see at Saint Laurence Church. It was a pretty intense effort to set up the hosting and build the site in just one weekend. But it built some further experience with WordPress.
This post is dedicated to my war horse vertical antennas. I’ve found verticals to be quite useful in my relatively small yard. My first vertical was the Butternut HF2V that runs 80 and 40 meters. Later I added the 30 meter coil. The antenna works superbly over the CW portion of the bands. While 80 meters is a little bit narrow, due to the limited length/height of the antenna, the built in Elecraft K3 ATU takes care of thing nicely. The 40 meter side of the antenna is perfect since the antenna is 32 feet high, right at one-quarter wavelength. For this same reason 30 meters also works very well. I’ve added a number of radials to the antenna. A couple radials are for 80 meters and roughly four are at 40 meters with a few smaller radials added to fit into the side yard where the antenna is installed. It is also near a chimney that can’t help with the radiation pattern. But still, it works well in contests.
My other vertical is the Cushcraft MA6V that covers all bands from 20 meters to 6 meters. I’ve mounted it on top of two 10 foot masts. It has “built-in” radials that essentially make this a vertical dipole. It works very well during contests and brings in a fair bit of DX. It’s not as good at that as my Moxon 15 meter beam, but it covers all bands and doesn’t require me to walk outside and turn it in the direction of the DX!
For both these antennas I have a balun at the base of the antenna and another when the coaxial cable enters the house. This keeps RF off the feedline and at least that doesn’t add further issues with the radiation pattern or with RF in the shack. Of course, when my maximum output in 10 watts, I no doubt wouldn’t know if there was any RF in the shack.
That’s the run down on my vertical antennas. One day I hope to build a phased array of verticals for 40 meters. But that will have to wait until I have some more real estate.
Update October 2023. I’ve refurbished and reinstalled the MA6V. Read about it here.
[…] that covers 20 to 6 meters. This added to my HF contest capabilities. Here’s my blog post HF Verticals. I avoided using this antenna on six since at first I had the dipole and later a Moxon followed by […]