Dipole

Building A linked Dipole

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IMG_1989It’s been a little while since I have posted, and its not because I haven’t been doing anything. I’ve been getting my portable station even more portable that before. Ov er the past 3 weeks where I have had a spare evening I have been putting together a new portable station that is even more lightweight than the previous setup featured in my post on Peter Murrell Reserve. Key to this has been producing a linked dipole.

Linked dipoles provide the benefit of creating a single-wire antenna that is resonant on multiple bands without a tuner by “linking” together lengths of wire with clips. While there is no limit on how many links you make, it may not be practical to make the dipole suit everything between 1.8 and 450 Mhz.

I ended up going for a 5 band antenna – 6m, 10m, 15m, 20m, 40m.

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Stuffing the Smoke Back In!

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Loads

This post will end the saga where I let the magic smoke out of a somewhat expensive commercial antenna.

Today a package arrived in the mail from china which greatly excited me. In it was 100x 10k ohm 3 Watt carbon film resistors from eBay, costing around $8 including delivery. with these, some Veroboard and a little bit of patience I was rebuilding the resistive loads in the antenna. one of the old loads is on the left and the new home brew one is on the right. The damaged resistors are marked as 10k ohm, but measuring them with a multimeter gave a reading of 1.1k ohm.

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Going Mobile

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QRV Mount Rumney
Mobile test run at Mount Rumney. not a bad view!

For a long time it has been a goal to take my own station portable to work HF. This week I finally achieved that goal.

It’s taken me a long time to get there, with the project starting in 2006 when I purchased a portable aluminium mast for the car that can be assembled as high as 12m (39.3 feet). With the help of Bruce (ex VK7MBD) a custom tow bar mount was made, allowing the assembly and raising of the mast to be possible by 1 person. After this, things went quiet on that project as a result of my hiatus from the hobby.

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Back on 6m

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I’m finally back on the 6m band. It wasn’t a cakewalk, with the dipole generally un-cooperative with the element parting ways with the Acro-bat insulator, and then finding the masthead pulley rope (pictured to the right in the photo) was no longer going up to the masthead, meaning that I needed to lower the mast to … Read more