Bank holiday portable…
20m vertical dipole |
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A dull damp and windy bank holiday Monday - not ideal weather for a bit of portable operating but you have to take the opportunities as they present themselves so off I went to a local playing field to try an end-fed 20m dipole in a vertical configuration.
I had previously trialed a 17m end-fed dipole with good results (see post of April 11th) so I was hoping the 20m end-fed dipole would work just as well. I wasn’t disappointed! The antenna is a commercial design manufactured in the USA by Par Electronics - they call them ‘End Fedz’ and that’s exactly what they are, end-fed antennas, or end-fed dipoles to be more precise. Each antenna is fed through a band specific matching unit and there are no additional radial or counterpoise wires required. |
This makes the antenna really easy to deploy in either horizontal, sloper or vertical configurations. This also makes them ideal for portable operations because they only need a single support.
For this quick test I pulled into a parking area just off the A51 in Lichfield adjacent to a number of sports pitches. A grassed bank at one end of the parking area makes a nice elevated platform for the vertical antenna and it was here that I erected the 20m dipole supported on a 10m fibreglass pole. As the picture shows, the wire wasn’t particularly straight because the wire is about 18 inches longer than the pole. Held loosely like this with about 6 inches floating at the top it worked very well.
Once erected and all hooked up to the radio the SWR was a lovely 1:1 across most of the 20m band. Using the FT-857 stations were strong from both North America (VA3GA, W8VS and W8PHZ all 59+) and Asia (BD7MSN 58, JE1LET 59+, JA1DIC 59). I also heard ZL4PD very clearly who was peaking 56 with me.
I worked a bit of DX in the form of UN7QF (Genna in Almaty) who was 59 with me - he gave me a 55 report and JE1LET (Masa in Tokyo with 2×4 el yagi - he was booming 59+) who gave me a 58 report. After that I also worked a run of European stations in the form if II2ERBA, RU3AWI (Valeri in Moscow), HB9AVT (Herb in Zurich), DF5PE (Dieter in Frankfurt) and HB9ROX (Kurt nr. Bern) with reports varying from 55 to 59+. Not bad at all for a first outing.
You can view the pictures of this antenna on the Portable Amateur Radio gallery page.