I've been building my 244 meter (800 foot long) en-echelon (end-fire) staggered array little by little, I already had installed the single wire last month, and today I installed the second wire. WHEW...is all I can say. It's cold, muddy-snow-wet overcast and I'm sore and super tired now. BUT! It's working! I have some testing to do yet, and some final cleanup left to do.
I also added a common mode choke at the junction point where the RG6 runs back to the shack (and that really seemed to clean things up too).
In my opinion there's really not much to see in photo's for this project. But I can think of maybe one or to more besides these few.
I found a '0 degree" 0.25 Mhz to 300 Mhz splitter/combiner brand new made by Mini-Circuits on Ebay for $15.00 (I got that one, and the seller gave me a second one for free!) - these normally sell for about $55 new from Mini Circuits so that beats building one. These are known to be some of the best available from what I've read.
I found it a bit confusing to get solid details on building the en-echelon (end-fire) staggered array. Even with decent instructions from several respectable sources. They conflicted with each other. So I went with what seemed the most logical.
My lines are nowhere near parallel! but I think based on what I've read that shouldn't matter all that much. I did the best I could tho, and the wire-lengths, and staggering are VERY close to spot on I think.
When I use my 1/4 wave vertical elevated ground plane I see USA (a fair amount of them), and when I switch to the array ... they almost all drop off or are drastically reduced. So I think that the lobes are at least close to right :-)
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