My antenna junk bin is full … of antennas that work (somewhat). Since my ham radio rebirth two and a half years ago (CW only, QRP only), I’ve focused on antennas. Almost all have been home built and used on the Casa Easton Antenna Test Range, my backyard on the edge of a Florida marshland (sometimes called a swamp).
POTA hunting is my favorite activity, using CW on the HF Bands. My log just passed 4000 entries. Like “Salty Walt,” K4OGO, my favorite off-the-air pastime is building antennas. I say “build” explicitly since I’ve had about 70 years tinkering with building things, and a bit over two years learning lots of antenna theory. I believe antennas are the success factor for QRP HF communications. [Trivia fact: The ARRL Antenna Handbook weighs five pounds, with 1120 pages.]
I very rarely buy commercially made antennas. Why spend $129 on a simple coil and 66 feet of wire? My commercially built antennas include, several Hamsticks, a Wolf River Coils 17′, an AX1, the TW2010 from DX Engineering, and Yaesu’s ATAS-120A. Home built antennas include over a dozen variations of wire dipoles, wire EFRWs and wire EFHWs
For 20m and higher, the TW2010 is the better of the expensive ones. It has reached Alaska from Florida. The ATAS-120A works well, reaching WY on 20m. The Hamsticks and home-built antennas are my every day, easy to deploy antennas, and consistently get within a half S-unit of their more expensive brethren. The AX1 is surprising for its size, but not quite a continent spanning antenna. My favorite of all is an EFHW deployed as an inverted vee using a carbon fiber 20′ telescoping mast. It’s naturally resonant on 4 bands and my rigs are happy using it without a tuner. Oh yeah, one last constraint: I’m a daytime antenna user. The HOA keeps me using easy to deploy stealth antennas, and night time creatures from the swamp (erm, marsh) cause me to bring antennas in at dusk. Another “one last constraint” is the absence of any tall trees on our property.
A few days ago I had my 21st QSO with Paul Caldara, K7SHR, who often operates near that big park in NW Wyoming. I blatantly stole the Wyoming Windsock photo from Paul’s QRZ page. That QSO sparked a question: what antennas easily reach Florida to Wyoming (abt 1750 miles) with 5 watts. I sorted the log on the antenna column and found that our QSOs used a broad range of antennas, from the simple 20m Hamstick to an $800 commercial vertical dipole, the TW2010. RST results range from 229 to 559. Paul is careful with RST reports, so I trust these. All of those QSOs used either a 5w TR-45L or one of the 4w QMX rigs. The biggest variable was propagation, not the antennas.
So, this has been a long way of saying “All antennas work, some just a bit better than others.” Remember this when seeing the latest new shiny thing from the fanboys on YouTube.
Leave a Reply