A new antenna for £2.99?
My results in the recent WPX contest certainly suggest that is indeed the case. A new antenna for just £2.99 - how could that be?
To be perfectly honest it’s not an entirely new antenna. It’s probably about 90% of the wire previously used in a sloper configuration to which I have added an 8ft clothes line prop/pole. The clothes line prop is lashed to the back fence at the point where the old antenna was attached to the fence, only now the end of the antenna is some 7ft highter than before with corresponding increases along it’s length, all the way up to the shack window at about 25ft.
The antenna wire, end fed at the top, is now shorter by about 10ft and there are some issues on 40m where I need to limit power to no more than 40 watts. However, on 30m and above it is working fine. The SEM TranZmatch (z-match tuner) gives good matches on all bands 30m-10m and results on 30m and 20m are particularly encouraging (which was a great relief having undertaken this work the afternoon before the WPX CW contest started where 20m would be the band on which my efforts were concentrated). A few contacts were possible on 15m but conditions weren’t great so I’m reserving judgement on the 17/15/12 and 10m bands until they start to open up as cycle 24 develops and propagation improves.
So, for a sum total of £2.99 and a little effort, it seems I have a new, improved antenna that, for now at least, has renewed my enthusiasm for the hobby that was previously a little bit flat based on recent experiences with the previous form of the antenna. It’s still a seriously compromised setup but given the limited possibilities at my location, as long as it works, it’ll do for now!