Experiments with operating the radio at home continue. Had a wacky idea to use the anchor in the tree over my balcony as the support for a 20m inverted-V dipole, fed with 300ohm twinlead for multi-band matching. Brainstormed a plan to use a pair of bamboo fishing poles, anchored by pole brackets on the balcony …
Tag Archives: antenna
Balcony Into the Sky
Getting more brazen with my antenna projects at my apartment. Used a reshaped coat hanger with a pulley and a lead weight to hook over a tree limb over my balcony. Now I have an anchor point to hang my 10m vertical dipole (or any other antenna that’ll fit). The anchor is below the peak …
Blast and Blow
To catch you up to date: when I set my radio output to 100W full power in the car with the new mobile antenna, the SWR is so bad that the radio lowers its output power to 40W to save itself. I experimented with a few hypothetical fixes: Run on 12V battery instead of the …
The Go Forward Backoff
Went to Belton, TX for the Ham Radio Expo held there twice a year. Big swapmeet and convention. Picked up a trunk-lip antenna mount for the car and a multiband antenna for HF — 80m through 2m. Cool thing about the antenna is that instead of using lossy traps to keep the antenna resonant for …
Backstop
I’ve heard of it being done, but I kinda secretly want to wire my radio and my antenna tuner to a softball backstop fence to see what kind of signal I can get out. I have no idea if I can match the impedance of a backstop, or if I will be able to deal …