I signed up at the local club to be an activator for lctota.org, so my 2 element beam pointed at New Zealand wasn’t really ideal. I really needed an antenna that would cover as much of the U.S. as possible, so I went with a simple horizontal dipole facing East / West. I have a great 3rd floor balcony over a downhill slope.
I’m using my telescoping mast to get the bulk of the antenna in the air, and started with aluminum tape over 3′ chimney brush rods for the far 1/4 wave (coax and a common mode choke for the near 1/4 wave). But naturally that gave me about 75 ohms impedance (rotated through my feed line), which is a little high for my amp. So I switched to meandered flat aluminum wire (1mm x 10mm). Conveniently Amazon sells it in a 16.5 ft length for about $10. The chimney brush rods have metal 1/4″ NPT ends, which I used to make the antenna easy to disassemble. By meandering both the flat wire and the coax feed line, I got pretty close to 50 ohms on my 2nd try. I have about 200 kHz that’s under 1.4:1, which I can center anywhere in the band by pulling an extra 6″ of coax through the common mode choke.
It’s a bit of a hazard, as the telescoping mast is only secured using a 100 lb sandbag, so I take it down when not in use.
Oops, it looks like the duct tape holding up the coax failed in one spot, so it’s a little droopy. I’ll have to fix that.
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