Brilliant idea (well done Lee!)👍🏻 The number of times I’ve seen pack of those hanging up (& bought some) and it never occurred to me that they’d be a good base. My radials miss out 90° due to my pond. One thought Tim. If you fancied a job, you could scratch out some of the paving joints and zig-zag some wires inside the patio. Then touch-up with a bucket of mortar 🤔
That's a pretty cool idea. I did it the hard way and sort of copied the DX Engineering one out of stainless plate. After about 140m of radials in a really compromised location, I finally had a decent enough ground under my Hustler for it to tune and work properly!
FWIW I did similar (but different) using an inverted frying pan stolen from the kitchen. Just cut a hole in the centre with a jigsaw, drill out the rivets for the handle and you can drill as many radial fixings as you want.
My local pound shop had some 'sink strainers', round aluminium plates. dished in the centre otherwise flat. And lots of M5 holes, including one in the centre. The pack had 2 plates, a big one with getting on for a hundred holes and a smaller one with a dozen or so. Well, I needed a sink strainer and the small one was ideal. The bigger plate - I sunk a 2m ground rod, drilled and tapped it to take an M5 bolt, bolted the plate on and used it as a radial plate! £1 for the actual sink strainer was poor value. But I got a free radial plate! I spent more on the nuts and bolts, also crimp eyes than I did for the plates.
I like this idea. Will 75m of wire be enough? I have about 200m on the ground. Which for my 10w is good. Just need to reduce the amount of kw users in pile ups!!
Thanks Gary. Once you approach 16 quarter wave lengths of ground radials the returns on more radials start to diminish quite a bit. Plus only having 180 degrees to play with. Sounds like you are having fun with a vertical too? Agree with the kw stations but it makes your DX contacts all the more sweeter when you make them! 73
I use the DX Commander ABV. I to have had to compromise on my radial direction. I have found very little difference in real world connections between directions. I have more swr problems with swr than anything else with this vertical.
Forgive me I am puzzled. You say 75m of radials, but they are all short 1m-ish totalling 75m. I thought the individual radials had to be 1/4 λ or near? This is important to me because my garden is max 10m by 5m and the vertical cannot be in the geometric centre and I have been agonising not a little. Perhaps I read too much. This is the second comment. Do I get a discount? :-D
The ideal is 1/4 wave but 1/8 wave or less will still work. Rudy Severns’ work on this found less than a db difference so in the real world shorter radials should work. The DX Commander antenna employs 2.5m long radials including for 40 and even 80m. Way shorter than 1/8 wave long but they work fine. Also even a 90-120 degree radial arc will work. 73
@@timg5tm941 This issue of ground radials has always been a problem for my head. I am a technical guy - or was but not so practical. Ofter "Counterpoise" is reffered to. I am prepared anything which works and my postage stamp sized garden seems so much bigger now. Just got to get some Home Brew stuff started and try out 80m with my """long""" wire and an SG auto tuner then some vertical experiments. You are extremely motivating,
Hi Tim. Just set up my shack and running a Icom 7300 into a Moonraker GP2500 radial free vertical. My issue is i'm getting lots of static across the whole bands. I'm not receiving much either. Any ideas. M7MGD. I'm using the auto tune.
Hi Tim. The antenna is mounted on aluminium poles which interlock. The top 100mm of each pole is narrow to allow next section to go on. I have left this 100mm section above the antenna bracket so I can clamp it to the pole. This 100mm section is above the bracket and next to the antenna. I have fit a clip on ferrite on the coax and left a small loop. Hope this helps.
Yep to a degree certainly. There’s always a compromise and from what I’ve researched the directionality isn’t a massive issue with the ground mounted variant of the quarter wave vertical. 73
I was born in 1944. My first experience with Amateur Radio was in Secondary School. A friend of mine was an Amateur whoes father had the call sign G5RW. I was beging to think that this call sign series was being reissued so I checked. Your TM sign would have been issued after RW I think so you must be at least n your 90s. Forgive me but you have worn rather well. Please explain your secret.
