Willshire Park - Willshire, Ohio
Dave - KD8AZO and Gil - KE9F (formerly KT9OUT)
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July 25, 2017
July 25, 2017
Gil and Dave took a short jaunt out to Willshire Park on July 25, 2017. We wanted to experiment with an antenna design that Gil had found on the Internet. He had 2 pieces of 300 ohm twin lead, each about 75 feet long to work with. Below is a description of what he came up with. And since Dave loves to cook out on portable backpack type stoves, took his implements of destruction with him, as well. We didn't take photos of that, unfortunately.
Here is Gil scanning the bands and looking for activity. We actually did make 5 phone contacts on 20 meters while we were out there even though the bands were fair to poor.
Here is the antenna strung out. We put the tripod halfway between two tall trees and managed to get a line all the way to the top of each using a fishing tackle setup and some paracord. The radiators were cut at just over 33 feet each from 300 ohm TV twin lead and made into a folded dipole effectively making each radiator 66 feet long (or close). It was fairly easy to tune and VERY quiet. The big plus...it could be heard as 100 watts and a wire! Looking at the match between the radio and antenna, it looks like it could have been make just a bit longer to bring the resonance closer to 40 meters.
This was pre-made the night before using a 1x2 and mounted with 2 band clamps. Cup hooks were used for strain reliefs. The radiators were cut and attached at the park and additional strain relief was made using Rescue Tape.
In the first of these two photos, we show you the tripod, radiators, and lead-in (450 ohm ladder line) and the second is the radio we used, an Alinco DX-70TH, vintage from the 90s, and an MFJ Versa Tuner III 962C which did an awesome job of making sure the radio saw a good match. Our antenna design wasn't exactly resonant on any of the major ham bands, though we did see through testing that it liked 8 MHz a lot. Perhaps we'll do a later modification to make it more resonant to 20 or 40 meters. But as it was, this park outing was a success!
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