[Thursday: 3 miles with the dog. Saturday: 5 miles with the dog and the wife on a beautiful fall trail]<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I could do something completely wacky and build a large copper loop in the attic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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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[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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ham-radio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7247"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7248,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7247\/revisions\/7248"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}