Portable antnennas

[Mark Tellez]

Hello all,

I would like to get some advice - based on experience - regarding the
various portable antenna options there are currently available on the
market.  I am considering the buddipole system, super antenna, chameleon,
and others.  I am interested in hearing about performance and quality/
durability of the construction.  I am not going to be backpacking with the
antenna but portability and ease of setup is a consideration.  I will be
operating from 6m all the way through 80m.

Thanks to all in advance.

Mark
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[k6dgw]

Boy, are you ever going to get overwhelmed with info, Mark! :-))

You might want to join the NASOTA Yahoo Group and post your question
there too, they're the folks that climb summits with radios and there is
a huge amount of field antenna experience to be mined there.

[insert all the usual disclaimers here, I'm retired and I have no
financial interest in any product I am about to name]

I had a full-up commercial BP for quite awhile.  It is very well
constructed, very sturdy, and customer service is very good.  There is a
BP Yahoo crowd full of good info.  It is also quite heavy, relatively
speaking, and takes awhile to set up and get tuned ... I had "recipes"
for the tuning but still needed the impedance bridge.  Despite pictures
of a variety of arrangements for the BP, there really seem to be only
two -- ground plane vertical and low OCF loaded dipole.  Mine worked OK,
best in vertical GP configurations where height doesn't mean as much as
in horizontal ones.

I finally sold it and bought an Alexloop.  The cost is about the same
although you can HB a resonant loop pretty easy for a lot less.  It's a
magnetic loop and is really a resonant transformer.  It is MUCH lighter,
way fewer parts, and I can set it up and take it down in about 5 min.  I
use it on a tripod for a Rain Bird sprinkler I got at Home Depot, it's a
couple feet above me when I'm operating, and I can adjust the tuning.
The Alex covers 40-10, although the loop isn't really large enough for
40m and the tuning is quite critical.  30m is better and it works great
above 30m.

Many of the SOTA crowd use end-fed half-wave wires.  They are extremely
light [just wire and a transformer], and they are fairly immune to the
issue of "Where is the RF Ground?"  They do require at least one support
to get them up into the air.

I'm pretty happy with my loop, it works at least as good as the BP, and
it is easy to carry and set up.  Those who run up mountains [NASOTA has
them :-)] like stuff even lighter.  Field operation, on a mountain top
or in a local park is truly a lot of fun.  There are a lot of field
operating events, and Elecraft has some really cool field radios.  I use
my KX1 in the Spartan Sprint each month, and I use my K2 for summit
activations.  It's an element of ham radio that didn't really exist when
I was a teenager.

For the record, I'm 73 and a little orthopedically challenged so you
need to adjust the above to make sense for your current age and physical
situation.  Good luck, antennas are one of the last bastions of home
brew in ham radio.

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org

On 1/12/2014 4:14 PM, Mark Tellez wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I would like to get some advice - based on experience - regarding the
> various portable antenna options there are currently available on the
> market.  I am considering the buddipole system, super antenna, chameleon,
> and others.  I am interested in hearing about performance and quality/
> durability of the construction.  I am not going to be backpacking with the
> antenna but portability and ease of setup is a consideration.  I will be
> operating from 6m all the way through 80m.


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[Arno Dienhart-2]

Thank you, Fred, for the specific comparison btw. BP and AL. A few months
ago I was at a point where I needed a portable for my outings in the park.
Those two commercial antennas were on the top of my list.and I ended up
building two wire antennas, a vertical ground plane and a ZS6BKW dipole,
both to be hoisted into my favorite tree there. Despite the tree now having
an installed haul line, which saves me half the setup time and more, it is
still a fight with the wires each time.

 

So, when a used AL came up on Yahoo, I grabbed it and now, reading your
comparison, like it even more, having had the hunch that the BP will be a
bit more like my wires in the tree, as far as setup time is concerned. Of
course, an A/B/C/D comparison between the four would be better than
guessing, but I am making plenty of contacts with the AL.

 

For an upcoming trip to Greece, where I will bring the KX3 and the AL, I
will also bring a ~60' EF with a matchbox to be able to cover 80m. It will
be a HB of course. Just got the matchbox parts in the mail today (EARC
design) and am still researching the wire (between the yellow from SOTAbeams
and the 532 from Wireman).

 

That's the hardware. Running a small-scale "DXpedition" will be a whole
other subject for this green ham with not even 12 months under his belt.

 

73 de Arno K7RNO

SKCC #11131, NAQCC #6870

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[Gary Hinson]

How about making a homebrew multiband vertical for $not very much at all,
one that will literally fit in your pocket?  

Use a steel tape measure as the vertical radiator, with the body of the
measure lofted into the sky using a very low tech "bit of string" hanging
over the branch of a tree.  Run out a few radials on the ground beneath, and
feed with a short run of coax to your Elecraft exciter.  Pull or slacken the
string to adjust the length and get it to resonate and radiate on whichever
band you are using (you may be lucky if the body of the measure is heavy
enough to reel itself down when you release the string, but a safer method
uses a complete loop of string over the support, attached to the tape
measure body, so you can pull it either way).  

A 10m tape measure will do for 7MHz and up, provided you can find a sky hook
at least 10m up (palm trees in the tropics are about 15m high, I guess).  If
your tape is only 8m long (most are, here in NZ), simply add an extension -
a couple of metres of wire on the free end of the tape - and connect that to
your coax.  For 80m, if you have a 20m sky hook, you can extend the radiator
by adding another 10m of wire on the bottom end, or simply use the length of
wire as an inverted-L over whatever skyhook you can muster, the higher the
better.

Spring steel is not an ideal conductor but it's good enough, especially as
you will have /P and perhaps an exotic prefix for "gain"!

I think of this as the poor man's Steppir vertical.  If the aforementioned
palm tree is dangling over the sea on a tropical island, your $negligible
investment will amaze you.

There's a paper describing a slightly more sophisticated version on the web
- Google "Fat Max antenna" (Fat Max being the brand name of the tape measure
he used).  

73
Gary  ZL2iFB

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [hidden email] [mailto:elecraft-
> [hidden email]] On Behalf Of Mark Tellez
> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2014 13:14
> To: [hidden email]
> Subject: [Elecraft] Portable antnennas
>
> Hello all,
>
> I would like to get some advice - based on experience - regarding the

various
> portable antenna options there are currently available on the market.  I
am
> considering the buddipole system, super antenna, chameleon, and others.  I
> am interested in hearing about performance and quality/ durability of the
> construction.  I am not going to be backpacking with the antenna but
> portability and ease of setup is a consideration.  I will be operating
from 6m

> all the way through 80m.
>
> Thanks to all in advance.
>
> Mark
> __________________________________________________________
> ____
> Elecraft mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:[hidden email]
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html

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[k6dgw]

So Arno, if you know this delete and you're making "plenty of contacts"
so you may but just in case.  The Alexloop is a resonant transformer.
At it's resonant frequency, the coupling from the coax to the big loop
is huge.  Off its resonant frequency, it is nil.  If you have an ATU in
your radio, you should bypass it and tune the loop to 1:1 or as low as
you can get it.  Some folks have had disappointing results with the
loop, and in all the cases I worked with them on, they were
approximating resonance with the knob and then letting the ATU match it.

Good luck

73,

Fred K6DGW
- Northern California Contest Club
- CU in the 2014 Cal QSO Party 4-5 Oct 2014
- www.cqp.org

On 1/13/2014 3:51 PM, Arno Dienhart wrote:

> So, when a used AL came up on Yahoo, I grabbed it and now, reading your
> comparison, like it even more, having had the hunch that the BP will be a
> bit more like my wires in the tree, as far as setup time is concerned. Of
> course, an A/B/C/D comparison between the four would be better than
> guessing, but I am making plenty of contacts with the AL.


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