How to build a dipole antenna for Ham Radio! 

Thanks for the kind words!

Much appreciated!

Hi, It depends on the size of your balcony, but a dipole for the 10M band is small (28,400 16 feet 4 inches) which if you make it inverted V would be 8 feet 2 inches each leg.

@HamRadioPrep thank you for the response balcony is 12 feet by 5 feet, i think a v shape could work.

@@jaredsteele8506 One of the nice things about this hobby is playing with the antennas. With the space we have available we can put a wire antenna in different ways until we find the ideal position and with good SWR :)

Thanks for the info

Well, first of all, he refers to a balun that he printed. That is not a balun. It is a center insulator. To answer your questions, baluns with a ferrite core of some kind have a frequency range. There are many types of ferrites. In a RU-vid video I used the wrong type and it failed at about 30MHz. The ferrite got to almost 100c. He said at 100 watts you be the judge about the need for a balun. I believe that all HF antennas using coax as in this case, should have a balun. When he said in case some of the RF was reflecting from the antenna and onto feedline is not correct. Keep in mind that if you are using coax, it is a 3, yes, three conductor cable. The explanation is long but really simple. I would explain further but I am tired and just back from chemotherapy. 73, Jim Heath W6LG

Hope u get better Jim

@@ham-radio explanation is not that simple

Thanks for the further explanation Jim! Feel better soon!

Excellent video. I used a cheap plastic cutting board to make my insulators, hoping to get to a ham fest soon.

You should be building for whatever frequency you think you're going to be using. Most tuners will tune your antenna down if you build for the middle of the band, but you can cut for precise frequencies if you want to run without a tuner. Hams will commonly cut antennas for 14.074 mhz for an digital mode focused dipole, for instance.

We're working on a more detailed video coming soon.