Field days are done, and I've had the opportunity to spend the past month with my son now. This weekend really was our first opportunity to spend some time visiting my dad, and take care of a few things that have been needing to be done at his place.
I decided that it would be a good idea to see what things were like so far as setting up antennas and the like, now that I know a little bit more about the subject.
Anything I do is going to have to be extremely portable. At the moment I drive a caprice classic, and since I tend to take my dogs along on trips to visit my dad, anything I take along is going to have to fit in the trunk. This isn't quite as bad as it seams, as I can use the tent pole method of building support masts out of fairly short bits of material. Even with that though, I am looking at not much more than about 20 or at most 40 feet of elevation above average terrain, and the 40 foot thought seems unlikely to me. I can reasonably fit a bunch of 5 foot mast sections in the trunk, but I am not confident in many methods of getting 8 pieces to be reasonably stable going up Likewise 7 joints per mast seems a bit much. Sure I could do all of this in 10 8' pieces, but I don't have a roof rack (yet) and I personally think that me dragging a trailer around just for my ham radio antenna is a bit beyond where I feel comfortable being these days.
My dad lives in south eastern Minnesota, approximately at about 43 34' 49" N by 91 27' 40" W or in grid EN43gn at an approximate elevation of 1180 feet. A few years back I thought I knew enough to set up a long wire antenna for his Mw radio, so he could listen to WCCO a little bit easier. The solution I came up with is still not ideal, but should work well enough for him at night. One of the problems he encounters at night is that a Texas station comes up at night at 820, that tends to over power WCCO in this part of the state.
As little as I knew about antenna properties at the time, I had set up his long wire in a north-south orientation. This is less than ideal for his location, though it should do a pretty good job of eliminating the Texas station. So one of the things I did this trip was re-orient the antenna to head off into a north-east direction from the house.
For my own needs this trip I just wanted to try out the 'shortwave' antenna wire I had picked up at Radio Shack some time ago, and see if it did me any good. At an original length of 75', and minus about 5-10 feet for some experiments along the line, I figure I had a good 20 meter stretch of wire, which would give me a good 1/4 wave for 80 meters. Since I don't have a General ticket yet, I am not too worried about setting up the perfect antenna yet. All in good time.
For the moment I stretched the antenna wire from the corner of a window, to a tree out in the lawn. I simply tied a nylon rope to a bit of the house to get the house end fastened, and tied that to a loop in the wire, then attached a stretch of climbing rope I have had lying around for a while, and got that up into the branches of a tree, and relatively loosely fastened the rope to the tree. This is only going to be up for the weekend, and is only going to be used to listen to shortwave radio, so I am not looking for perfection in this either.
Over all, I am pretty happy with the setup. At 3:00 in the afternoon, I am clearly picking up stations from China, England, Venesualas, as well as the usual collection of christian radio stations from various locations within the US, all int the 25 meter bands. At night there are far more, showing up on the longer wavelengths, to the point it is getting hard to pick them out. I will admit as well that at night, the antenna that comes as part of my shortwave receiver does a passable job from this location as well.
Plans for the future. We all have some sort of plan, whether we actually get to follow through on it or not. My initial thought is to see about picking up about 150 to 200 feet of some sort of feed line, and set up an inverted V dipole. If I can figure out how to set up a 40' mast, (see notes above) and guy it well, I should be able to do some very basic orienting, or aiming of the antenna. Granted it won't be a beam, but from what little I know, or think I understand, that wouldn't work well on a simple mast that I can throw in my trunk. I would tend to think that a beam wouldn't fit in the trunk either.
After reviewing "Practial Wire Antennas 2" it would appear that I can use 50 ohm coax for the feed line for an inverted V. And as long as I am not too interested in feeding an 80 meter setup, I may be able to get away with a 24-30' mast. And yes, I do have an idea for making it multi-band.
Now all I have to do is tie up that loose end of passing my morse code requirement, so I can get my General licence, and actually make use of such an antenna setup. Well, OK, that and get an antenna tuner for whatever I work out.
73,
-Rusty - kc0vcu
P.S. I'm putting together a couple of photo albums of some of the pictures I took, and will post a link shortly.