Nice video, Steve. I have been using for over a year the WRC TIA with the 17' whip on a homemade ground spike. Mainly with a Xiegu G90. Works great. Thanks for another great video. KC8WVG 73
I’ve been running the WRC SB1000 with the MFJ 17’ whip on the WRC tripod with the long legs for a number of years now. Definitely works. I’ve never tried it on 80. Cool video!
Def do 80. I have the Silver Bullet Mini and use it with one of two 17’ whips, and use three 33’ radials. I will say I use a manual travel tuner too to fine tune, but I activate 80 a lot, as well as 60. 👍 And I didn’t buy the WRC stake, instead I took a piece of leftover copper ground rod and put cb mount on it. If you would like to try your own coil, I use a homebrew coil inspired by W0BNC, lets me get 40-60-80 (and 160 with help of Spiderbeam and a wire)
The long whip rocks as you have just find out. Only need the coil below 20m. The nearly flat curves below 20m indicate loss. Use a camera tripod, get the coil/whip off the ground, and use a single elevated tuned radial
I have to use my AA-55Zoom to tune the WRC. Great video Steve. I have the chameleon 17 footer as well. Much better than the MFJ. Gotta use the tripod in nature and wildlife preserves. Can't have anything in the ground or trees. Otherwise, I like the spike option.
Now move the coil up 4-6 feet and mid load it. You will get surprising performance on the low bands. I run mine on my mobile mount on a 4' mast with a 102" whip out the top when parked. Works great on 60 meters. The Hustler resonators will out perform the base loaded whip on 40 meters down. Base loading is pretty much the worst way to load a vertical as far as losses go.
The ones from the antenna makers are nice and have male/female ends. But the allthread would work too... Maybe see if there is some PVC it can slide into to protect your palms... Buddipole, JPC, SuperAntenna might sell the sections ala carte too
It's too bad that modern transceiver matching indicators don't include whether the big mismatch is inductive or capacitive. Or a super broad receiver noise level scan, so you could see which way to the peak. These rigs already have as much stuff as a modern antenna analyzer. If you have the time, you might try having the radio where you can hear received noise and tweak the coil to peak it. Yes, you are in the near field, so it will de-tune when you step away, but you will know that it is close, and be able to make tiny adjustments from there.
At some time I would like to see you just turn a 17 foot whip into a linked dipole with alligator clips and wire. I now have a pair of 17s, but have not had time to go try them out, a theme for this era of my life, but I expect them to just work.
"This antenna is not cricket, is just an optical illusion" LOL. Well, there we go, I have the coil but didnt know about the "forty thing'. NO, I dont need it....but I want it....ahhh
80 meters is a hard band to tune. I only run FT8 on 80 meters. so I only need part of the band. now everything sounds better on my laptop. I found my old soundblaster 5.1 USB EXT sound card. Plugged it in set my settings for 5.1 speakers. sounds great. was in my camping bag. I have 5.1 small speakers that sound great and a homemade class D 12/24V amp. only 50 watts . but in a tent it sounds super. My laptop has 4K 17in display . blu ray looks great ! And i have 3D glasses as well. Download the new version of WSJT-X. we have SUPER fox and hound now. Have not tried it yet. 73
As you likely know, SWR is only part of the story. That 80m BW looks very broad and by estimates it has a very low Q of under 10. While Q can be estimated by taking the ration of F_resonance/BW is is a measure of the ration Power_total/Power_resistive-lost. So while SWR looks good, most of the signal power is lost!..
