A few days ago I decided instead of just turning my radio's off for the whole winter as I have in the more recent past 20+ years, instead I would try to fill gaps in my HF DXCC. I spoke to a good friend of mine K1CP (Clif) asking him abound suggested antenna designs for 30 meters (10 Mhz) among other things and he suggested that I do a simple "1/4 wave Ground Plane". These are nice and simple, and don't even require any matching network. So in the course of about 30 minutes I raided my junk box and gathered enough bits and pieces to put something together.
Another 1 hour later and it was done, and hanging in a tree outside my Ham Shack.
Now I started out with 48 DXCC on 30 meters, all done with CW from year gone by whenever I happened to feel like getting on HF.
It's now been 24 hours and I actually pulled an all-nighter. I stayed up 36 hours working DX on 30m using this new antenna. My DXCC count is now up to 92! Confirmed.
Here's a few pix of it as-is.
BTW I added an HF Choke at the bottom so I could tune it up on 40m without getting RF in the shack. (it doesn't seem to work so well on 40m tho! I think when I get to 100 confirmed on 30m that I'll just extend this antenna another 10 ft and work on 40m!)
Wow, something that simple is working so well. Nothing beats a tuned resonant antenna. I love the rusty screws on the old 259B. Keep on DXing. 73, Bas
ReplyDelete4 more countries now and I'll have DXCC. It's amazing to me how well this works. Yes I was wondering if anyone would comment on the rusty screws. I live in Maine, USA, on an island in the mouth of a salty river near the Ocean. I left it outside over night 1-2 nights this past summer, and well...nature does what nature does. I should really clean up the OLD MFJ-259. It's served me well for many years, probably a good idea to clean the old thing up and get more years out of it. :-) - Thanks for your comments.
ReplyDeleteAnother Update I'm not at 105 DXCC confirmed. Just a few days later. I've already applied for it :-) LotW makes HF chasing SO MUCH more fun that the old QSL daze (in my humble opinion).
ReplyDelete