The Homebrew
40, 30, 20, 17, 15, 10 Meter Vertical
I have no idea what the radiation pattern looked like but it tuned these bands with the built in tuner in my Yaesu FT-990 and Texas gave me a 5-7 from our QTH in Florida. Propagation was to the west and we received good signal reports from all stations we talked with. We were running 100 watts on battery power from a field on the Gulf of Mexico. Next we will make another vertical and a harness to try phased verticals.
I cut the vertical to 32 feet 6 inches and the radials at 32 feet 9 1/16 inches.
The first 1 foot is a fiberglass insert to insulate the aluminum sections vertical from the ground. The ring is an aluminum ring is 1/8 inch thick fashioned on my drill press and a copper sheet hammered over it for the radials to mount to.
I may make a loading coil and try for 80 meters. Another idea is a capacitance hat to see what happens. I'll let you know in a while... my new home is almost ready and hopefully I'll be moving soon to my final shack.
Update 1/1/07
I drilled a hole where each section mates and color coded them so the holes would match with a 1/2 inch thick plastic support ring for the guy ropes. I have a measuring rope (a military way of doing things for the simple minded like me) of 23 feet hooked at the base of the vertical...I then go to three points on the compass to sink my support stakes. We tied off two guys with the pre-measured guy lines and walked the vertical up with Jim walking the antenna up (you need two people but Jim did it alone) and myself pulling the third guy line and clipping it on the third stake in the ground. Notice the 2 meter beam in the right hand corner of the picture so we could stay in touch with friends on our repeater. The N4AAC repeater http://n4maa.us
Jim (N4AAC) and Tracy (KG4MRG) at the operating position it was a beautiful day in Florida. This was done on November 5th, 2006 close to Fort De Soto Park in the southern part of Pinellas County, Florida. see Ft. De Soto here