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Ham Radio

Antenna thoughts

[Thursday: 3 miles with the dog. Saturday: 5 miles with the dog and the wife on a beautiful fall trail]

I’ve been a bit remiss in my blog posting and my running. Last Saturday I went for blood donation and I’m blaming my lethargy on that.

I’ve been thinking some more about my antenna situation. My goal is to get some kind of wire antenna in the air. I’ve purchased a spool of 12 gauge stranded wire at Lowes to add to that which I already have. And I purchased a chimney clamp/strap thing. The chimney thing will let me mount a vertical pole on a chimney we have that appears to be otherwise unused.

Right now my best idea is to make an off-center-fed dipole using the chimney pole as the high point. The two di-pole legs would end up at the garage and at the fence. The antenna wires would go horizontal from that pole and straight into the attic. I would operate in the attic on battery power. I would have a short piece of 300 ohm feedline. I expect it to get cold in the attic, but not so bad that I couldn’t dress up sufficiently and do OK for an hour or two.

My 2nd best idea is to try to run either open-wire or coax feed line down to a basement window and into the basement. That would be warmer, have better grounding, but probably more trouble getting the antenna tuned correctly and I would have higher losses due to a longer and more complicated feed line.

Besides feeding it, the next biggest issue is having enough space for the length I need to operate on the lower bands. Pacing off the longer dipole-leg distance, the one east to the fence line, it looks to be about 50 feet. A regular 80 meter dipole is more like 66 feet. The other leg looks quite a bit shorter.

I could do something completely wacky and build a large copper loop in the attic.

The fastest result would probably be to put a pulley on the chimney and use it to hoist up the center of the store-bought G5RV that I was using in Mississippi and find some way to zig-zag the extra leg length and use it up somehow.

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