ARROW Communications Association

The WPX CW contest has been much on my mind since the late Fall contests. This one is a personal favorite. But what about that big horizontal loop I've wanted so badly? I REALLY wanted to get it up before the contest.

I prowled the woods and yard around the house on a number of occasions this Spring, staring up at the trees, frustrated with the large numbers of intervening branches. The appearance of the leaves just made things worse, but I still hadn't found a good path for the wire, at least one that wouldn't have the height of the wire ranging from 10' to as much as 90' in the air. While I'd anticipated some of this, I just wasn't sure the antenna would work as well with that much vertical excursion in it.

Two days to the contest, and I was feeling a bit desparate. The fan dipole was still working great, but the HF9v seemed more lossy as the foliage was filling in around it. I added more radials to bring the total to about 18, but couldn't really sense or measure a difference. I needed something vertical and efficient to balance against the horizontal dipole.

The tribander driven element was in pieces at the back of the house, so I decided the quick solution was to get that back up in the trees. A couple of tosses with the fishing pole and 1 ounce weight, and I had 3/8" black nylon rope over the top of one of the tallest trees behind the house. I assembled the antenna and pulled it up into the tree. I tested it extensively, and it works better than it ever did before, and turns in signal strengths equal to or better than the fan dipole, which is itself great. I got a 589 from a guy in VP5, who complimented me on my QRP signal (I told him I was QRP AFTER he gave me the signal report). Of course, propagation was REALLY responsible, but at least the antenna could take advantage of it. I know the guy was getting a lot of calls from the US, but he picked me up on first call.

Unfortunately, the branches supporting the tribander element aren't very big, and it's kind of heavy. The next day (yesterday) I could see that the topmost branch in the tree had broken, letting the rope drop to rest on lower branches and making me wonder how long the dipole would stay up there. The dipole is 32' long, and now has sagged down to where the bottom of it is probably about 35' off the ground. Besides that, I really wanted an efficient antenna that would cover 40 and 80m ... what to do?

So, I ran to the big box home builder store and bought a roll of black, 14 gauge stranded wire (500' for $35) and 300' of 3/16" nylon rope ($45) and got the fishing pole out again. The first cast went a bit wild. I knew it went high in the 90+' trees, but I completely lost sight of where it went. I could tell as I paid out fishing line that it was coming down to ground, but I couldn't spot it to save my life. When the line I paid out was no longer taken up I knew the weight had hit the ground, though I hoped it wasn't hung up somewhere in a tree or I'd never find it. I was ready to start walking the woods with my arms outstretched, hoping I would find the fishing line that way, and was still jiggling the line, hoping to see some leaves moving somewhere nearby in the woods, when my faithful cat Minnow, who had followed me into the woods, appeared about 30' away and pounced on something. I went over to see what it was and, good kitty, she had pounced on my jiggling weight.

I retrieved the weight, praised and petted the cat, and made a second cast that went beautifully over the top of a possibly-100' tree and came down into a small clearing quite near me. Perfect. I pulled some 3/16" nylon rope over the tree and went back to the house to build the antenna.

I found a piece of metal rod and pushed it through the sides of a large cardboard box, mounting the spool of hookup wire on it. Then I put the loop at the end of my 100' tape measure over the end of the rod and walked out two 65' lengths of wire and two 33' lengths of wire, intending to make a vertical 40/80 fan dipole.

For insulators I dug out my bag of old toothbrushes, but only had about 9 of them ... this antenna, being vertical, would need more spacers than my horizontal one, where I just let the 40m wires droop below the main 80m element to provide spacing. I didn't want the the 40m wire tangling around the 80m element, as that would compromise performance and detune the antenna.

I had an old dark green plastic deck chair with a broken leg, so I grabbed my jig saw and cut the hard plastic into strips about an inch wide and 6-8" long. I heated up the 100 watt soldering iron and used the hot tip to melt 2 holes each in the toothbrushes and plastic strips. (I'm going to make spacers this way if I ever decide to make some ladder line, too.)

Now I'm ready to build the antenna and get it up in the air. I realize I will have to bend both ends of the 80m dipole to clear the ground -- the tree isn't tall enough -- but if I can get the center up about 60' or so it should make a great and very efficient antenna. Now ... I have less than 5 hours until the contest starts, and I'm still at work, so ... I'm getting the heck out of here and will make another blog entry in a few days to report on how the vertical fan dipole went up, and how it performed in the contest. I have 3 antennas up again, and I'm going for 4!!
Best rx & 73 to all - Tim, KT8K