Trial foundation assessments are now available on the WIA web site.

https://www.wia.org.au/licenses/foundation/onlineexams/foundation.php

Hi all,

I’m presenting here a compact, completely self contained vertical antenna that I have conceived,  designed and built recently. This antenna is primarily for portable operation on the 30 and 20 metre bands (although it could be easily adapted for other bands). Being a portable antenna, it had to tick a few boxes, as I intend using it on some planned VKFF park activations that will be taking me near salt water…

1. Be light weight – Fiberglass, aluminium, nylon and stainless construction
2. Be compact – The entire antenna packs down into a package no longer than 1.5 metres
3. Be quick to erect – The antenna mounts on one of my ALDI Bike repair stand tripods that I use for portable operations and deploys in minutes.
4. Plug and play – Low maintenance, simple 50 Ohm Coax feed, no traps, easy to adjust
5. Be a good performer – Initial tests indicate it is an effective low angle radiator.
6. Have a very low environmental impact – Some park environments are fragile, so a stand alone antenna that uses no vegetation/natural features as supports protects that environment

Fig. 1

The inspiration for this antenna came after I came across this video from Peter, VK3YE back in 2015 on his most excellent YouTube channel. The construction details on his antenna were unfortunately rather brief, but used telescopic rabbit ear TV sections as his counterpoise, and a section of coil stock which he taps to bring the counterpoise to resonance against a quarter wave radiator. It’s wonderfully simple. Peter drew a diagram in the sand, but i’ll put one here…

Figure 1 shows the antenna. It consists of a 1/4 wave vertical radiator, with an Elevated, short counterpoise, that is tuned to resonance (think of it as the other half of a dipole with the 1/4 wave radiator) by adjusting the inductance of the ground tuning coil.

I just like to mention that I haven’t invented anything, but other than Peter’s video, I haven’t been able to find any concrete reference or practical examples to this kind of antenna on the internet. Peter mentions a page in Les Moxon’s “HF Antennas for all Locations” describing a short tuned counterpoise, but the second hand copy I hunted down (ISBN 0 900612 57 6) doesn’t have the same information. The diagram shown on page 186 in Peter’s version of the book in the video appears on page 157 in my copy. There is only a vague mention of the same concepts, nor is there any solid measurements or construction tips.

Fig.2

I have become reasonably adept at modelling and tweaking simple antennas in MMANA-GAL  Antenna modelling software. This is an excellent, free program that lets you visualise and design an antenna, and play with it to tweak its performance. I’m no expert, but after a short learning curve I’m able to do pretty much what I need to do reasonably quickly. So I drew the antenna thus… In figure 2, you can see the feed point – the red dot, the 1/4 wave radiator above it, and the  4 short counterpoise wires below. The ground tuning inductor isn’t shown, but is actually described in software. The wire I used as a radiator is just heavy duty grey plastic insulated wire. It has a velocity factor of about .93 so my 10.135 Mhz 1/4 wave is 6.875 metres long. The counterpoise “wires” –  actually 6mm aluminium tubing, are all 1.5 metres long. The lowest point of the antenna is at 1.00 metres from the ground, as this is the height bottom of the antenna stops when slid on to my portable mast mount. 

Ok, so what about the short counterpoise? How do we tune the antenna to resonance? We know the radiating element is at a 1/4 wave for our band of interest – in this case 6.875 metres long. Let’s add a short wire between the feed point and our 4 counterpoise wires to add a coil to…

The red wire shown in the model is only 100mm long, but is used to define where we will put our coil to bring the 4 short radials to resonance. This is defined as Wire 2.

Now we have the antenna defined in the program, We need to tell it that we are feeding the Antenna at the bottom of Wire 1. This is in the table Sources 1 w1b. The inductor is defined in the Loads 1 table The coil is defined here as w2c – i.e the coil is in the centre of Wire 2 and has a value of 5 uH. ( This was initially 20uH…it was twaked to 5uH to get the SWR down)

Ok now we can run the software to see what the antenna model will look like…

So here we have the result. Here we can see that the antenna has a feedpoint impedance of close to 40 ohms resistive, 8 ohms reactive with a SWR of 1.33. (This result is after I tweaked the value of the inductor from about 20 uH to 5 uH) The base of the antenna (tuned ground radials) is at 1.00 above real ground.

Lets look at how the antenna is radiating RF according to the software, here are some plots…

This shows the gain of the antenna is about 1.00 dBi, and the maximum radiation is at around 26 degrees towards the horizon.

Now we have a model that says what I have envisaged, should, in theory, work!

Let’s build it!

Pictures tell 1000 words so here is some shots of the various parts…

The Main radiator is a 9 Metre Squid pole, this slips over a 42mm PVC extension that slides into the top of the ALDI bike repair stand I’m using as a tripod. The top and bottom coil supports are cut and drilled from Nylon cutting board. The 4 radials below the coil attach to the triangular aluminium plate on the bottom coil support. The bottom of the coil is connected here, and the top of the coil is connected right at the earth connection of the SO239 socket on the top coil support. The Coil is soft aluminium craft wire, readily available from ebay. It’s easily formed into a coil and is slightly “springy”. There is a nylon clamp on the top coil support that allows the top support to move up or down, thus stretching or compressing the coil, to tune the antenna to resonance. The clamp secures it when the adjustment is completed. The 1/4 wave wire attaches to the centre conductor of the SO239 socket, and is loosely wound up the squid pole mast and secured. There is a common mode choke just below the feed point, it’s 17 turns of the coax through a single FT240-52 toroid. (shown here as RG174, since changed to RG58)

So what does our trusty nanoVNA tell us? After adjusting the length of the coil this is what the 30M band looks like…The antenna seems to be doing exactly what it should. Feed point resistance is 47.7 ohms, there is 1.36 nanofarads of capacitive reactance and the SWR is 1:1.26 .have to be happy with that…

I also experimented with a 20 metre band radiator, and added a shorting clip to shunt out some inductance to bring it resonance on 14.075…Here our SWR is 1:1.19…so its working here as well…

So how does it work on the air? It’s early days, and I had it set up very close to my house and fence, but the path to my east was clear and it certainly seems to get out. Some good DX to El Salvador and Guatemala on 30 metres FT8 was worked in the first few hours on the air…I easily worked the USA as well on both 20 and 30 metres. (all East of me)

TG9AJR

YS1RR

I’ll set this Vertical up in the clear on my block away from buildings in the next couple of days and see how well (or not) it works compared to my reference antenna. I’m hoping the low take off angle will allow me to work the more distant stations my reference antenna seems to struggle with.  I’ll update here when I’ve had more time to judge it’s performance.

I hope the information presented here is of interest to some. I really enjoy modeling and building antennas, but I’m pretty green! I’ll readily admit to not understanding many aspects of RF and I have no idea how efficient this antenna is, my ground losses, etc etc. I guess it’s all about learning and experimenting. I welcome any comments or criticism, please feel free to contact me if you would like any more details on what I’ve described here…

73

Andy, VK5LA

andyvk5la@gmail.com

***UPDATE***

Very happy with the antenna, I worked 100 countries in 7 weeks, pretty good going at solar minimum!

Got Noise? -Then this might get you back on HF if you’ve switched off because the “S” meter is S9 or S9+ when you turn on your rig, especially on the lower 160-80-40-30 Meter Bands…

If you live in suburbia, or even semi-suburbia, you might have, or are currently dealing with, high levels of noise in your Receiver when operating your radio. This is usually the worst when you’re trying to work that rare DX, a weak digital signal or even just your club HF net or Society news broadcast. Noise can be wearing. I have heard of many an Amateur that has switched off due to excessive noise and placed their hobby in the “too hard basket”. I even personally know of two radio friends who sold up and “moved to the country” in search of that holy grail of noise levels…S0.

I don’t claim I’m going to fix your noise issue but hopefully I can offer some guidance and experience in dealing with radio noise in the HF spectrum in your environment.

Firstly, If you can, set up your radio to run of of a battery and plug in your main antenna. Cut the power to your WHOLE HOUSE, (yes go out to your meter box and throw the main switch!), so that nothing is energised on your property. (Also cut your Solar if you have it and are able) Now see what your noise level changes to. Chances are, the noise level will drop, sometimes significantly. This is actually a good thing, because it means that it is highly likely that the noise source is at your place, and you can do something about it. More later.

If your noise doesn’t change significantly, then the likely scenario is that that your antenna is picking up a noise source from a neighbor, or a utility such as a nearby power line or other service.

***My first piece of advice is to make sure that your antenna feed line has a common mode choke.***

This will need to go at the feed point if it is a coax fed dipole or variant, or right at at the radio if it your antenna is an End Fed Half Wave or similar. If you are unsure what a common mode choke is, then grab a coffee, and  have a look at this from Steve, G3TXQ (SK).

Now have a read of this from Jeff, K6JCA. Both links are extensive and extremely informative.

If you’re still not convinced that you need some kind of common mode choke on the feedline of your antenna, please have a look at this video.  You can clearly see the effect on both Receive and Transmit.

Now back to our main objective, let’s look at another known source of noise, the very common Switch Mode Power Supply. These. things. SUCK!!! They are known generators of RF noise and interference. Generally, their cost is inversely proportional to the amount of RF they generate! The cheaper units leave off a few cents worth of EMI suppressing components to make them as nasty as can be. Most modern households these days have many gadgets and low cost Asian electronics, and they often come with one of these Switchmode power supplies. Phone and Tablet chargers, computer and laptop power supplies, garden and Christmas lighting, toys, decorations and fixtures containing electronics, LED light fittings and bulbs…Just about everything these days has an SMPS. Some are clean, but many can be excellent generators of broadband RF hash. Indeed, some can completely wipe out radio reception up into the UHF range, (like the charger our boys portable DVD player!!!)  The best way to find them is by a process of elimination, simply by going around the house and turning stuff off at the wall. This will soon expose the culprit , but don’t forget you need to cut the power to the particular device completely, not with just switching of with a remote or the front panel power switch, as this usually just turns off the displays, (think home electronics, Audio Visual gear etc. etc.) and the unit is still effectively powered up, and still drawing current from the power supply.

I had a particular problem with the power supply for my shack laptop, which is a Dell Lattitude E6410. Even though Dell is a reputable brand, used by business and governments around the Globe, the power supply generated a bad hash causing up to an S7-8 noise level, from 80-20 metres.

Simply wrapping the power connector lead through a FT240-43 Toroid core as pictured above, went a long way to eliminate this noise. The difference was remarkable. A point to note was that the power supply itself had just about every compliance tick and UL listing .

They mean nothing!

***My second piece of advice – hunt down, find and eliminate any cheap Switchmode Power supplies***

Replace them if you can, or alternatively get some ferrite rings and wrap the output leads through the cores as many times as you can.

Other sources of noise can be from the cables coming from your shack computer to peripherals such as printers, keyboards and mice, displays and USB leads and hubs etc.etc. Give these the toroid treatment as well, everything helps. (As an example, here is the USB lead from my laptop to the USB mixing desk I use to route microphone and other audio to my main HF radio directly into the balanced modulator), and to the little Raspberri Pi I use for digi modes. These all help in the scheme of things to drop your RX noise closer to S0. If possible switch to a bluetooth mouse and keyboard if you’re running a PC . This eliminates 2 leads from radiating computer hash in your shack.

Sometimes, noise can come from the 230V mains supply to your shack from many different sources. Perhaps from an appliance located at your or a neighbours house, such as a dishwasher, washing machine, deep freeze, hot water heater, solar hot water booster, microwave etc.etc if they are on the same supply phase. The noise this equipment can generate could radiate to your station via your power supply.

This is where this mains filter comes into play. Just like a common mode choke on our feed line (you have installed one, haven’t you?) the best way to eliminate or greatly reduce supply noise is to have a mains filter that incorporates a 2 stage EMI Filter with some hefty, multi frequency common mode choking of the 230V supply, before it powers the equipment of your shack.

After doing a bit of reading and on the advice of others, I was directed to this most excellent presentation describing a holistic approach to finding and eliminating such noise and the construction of such a filter by Ian White, GM3SEK, and the update here.

Here I’m describing my version of the filter that I built. Anyone should be able to reproduce this filter, using parts that were easily obtainable here in Australia. My parts came from Jaycar, RS components, Bunnings and Cheap as Chips.

***Disclaimer – this project describes working with Mains Voltage!!! ***

***If you are not experienced with working with the 230V mains wiring, find someone with expertise to assist and check your work!***

Parts List:

• 1 x Sealed Polycarbonate Enclosure 171 x 121 x 80 Jaycar Cat No. HB6224
• 1 x EMI Filter  – I had mine laying around, see Note 1 – RS Components
• 1 x Fair -Rite Large Ferrite core (clamp type) RS Components Stock No. 466-9164
• 4 Small Ferrite cores, Jaycar L15 Cat No. LO1238
• 1 x 10 amp 12 way Terminal strip (chocolate block) Jaycar Cat No. HM3196
• 1 x length 10 amp extension lead – Cheap as Chips
• 1 x 6 outlet power board overload protected – Cheap as Chips
• 2 x 16mm Cable Glands – Bunnings

Note 1: Delta Electronics 10 DRC5W 250Volt 10A 2 Stage EMI Filter or equivalent. I used one I had kept from an old Photocopier, hence the surface rust ! Just about any EMI filter with a 10 amp rating should do, RS Components lists many single and double stage filters that would be suitable.

A picture tells a thousand words, so here is how my filter came together…

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The completed unit with the lid off…

The end result is shown here. The filter simply installs between your wall socket and your equipment. The Cable glands grip the cable to prevent it from being pulled out. Cord grip grommets like Jaycar CAT No. HP0718 would probably be better, but I had the glands, so I used them.

So how does the filter perform? I have been using the filter for a little over a month. My location is quite good for HF and I am blessed with a quite low noise level on most bands, it was reasonably high on both 80 and 30M. I am unsure of the sources (it’s not my place) and my nearest neighbor is 250 metres away. The filter has dropped my 80M noise from S8-9 back to S3-4. this is a significant improvement on that band and I have been able to make contacts I probably would have struggled with previously. My noise on 30M did seem to come and go, noticeably with the operation of our dishwasher and washing machine. There can also be a bit of a noise hash on this band that was sometimes up to S7. I’m pleased to report that the hash has been significantly reduced and my 30M noise level sits at around S1, and I can no longer tell when the dishwasher is on! I like to take a holistic approach to noise and this filter has made a difference.

This is a simple project that might significantly reduce your noise level in the shack – build one and let me know if it works for you!

73 – Andy, VK5LA

I thought I’d give an update on this antenna since I’ve had several emails and messages enquiring about it. The antenna has been up for 3 weeks, and I’ve had over 500 QSO’s and worked some great DX, mainly using FT8 mode on 17, 20, 30 and 40M.

I ended up with a broken support after some strong winds so I had to buy a new squidpole for the fed end support. This new 9M pole ended up being about 1 metre shorter than the existing pole when added to the extensions. This has bought the feed point about a metre closer to the ground, and I’ve added a 200cm piece of fibreglass rod to the tuning cap shaft, to make it easier to adjust. I didn’t bother with adjusting the other vertical support leg lower to match, the antenna still works!

The angle of radiation is also low on 20 Metres and I’m using a 49:1 broadband matching transformer to put power into the antenna and touching up the match via my Radio’s internal antenna Tuner. It’s a reasonable performer on 20, but not as good as it is on 40

Another surprise is the 30M band. Although the modeling suggests the radiating pattern is quite potato shaped, I’ve been able to work pretty much everything I hear when the band is open. I do better into Europe on this band than 40 and 20 Metres

Best DX on 40M looking West (Africa) to date would definitely be Charles, 5H3DX in Tanzania…Al time new country!

and looking East to the Central America and the Carribean, Dev, 9Y4DG in Trinidad on 30M…(Then Frank, HB9EUW in Switzerland called me!)

I have been delighted so far with the performance of the antenna, especially since we are at the bottom of the cycle with no sunspots. I am at 199 DXCC countries worked. Who knows what will happen when ‘ol Sol wakes up!

I have also experimented with a 20M version of this antenna for portable operation. It fits in a plastic sandwich bag, takes minutes to set up, as it is only 2×5 metre lengths and 1×10 Metre length of wire that’s suspended between 2 squidpoles on stands. For the 20, however, I fed this at the 50 Ohm point with some coax at the top of a vertical section. The bottom of the vertical legs were about 1.5M  above ground, to get them away from the stands. This was very promising, as after adjusting the antenna to be resonant at around 14.1 Mhz, I was easily hearing stations from South Africa on the litte FT817. I didn’t bother to reply to them with my 5 watts, but they were good copy. I did have a good contact with Gerard, VK2IO, on 40 Metres, just before I packed up the antenna after my experiments. Gerard was operating from the Yellowmundie Regional Park, VKFF-0558. He gave me a 57, not bad for 5 watts.

The next outing for the antenna will be to use it on an activation in a VKFF park. On 40 and 30 Metres as an end fed, this antenna is looking promising as a decent NVIS radiator, ideal for this king of operating. Stay Tuned!

Now that there are social distancing rules that have us mostly at home for the near future, I realised that this is an excellent time to do some upgrades to the VK5LA antenna farm.  I have wanted a low angle, dedicated and resonant radiator for 40M for some time, and recent reading had me thinking about trying a Half Square antenna for that band. The full size dimension would fit easily across my my back yard, and I had available the supports required to get it to the correct height.

An added bonus is that I would be utilising Mmana Gal antenna modeling software and my new nanoVNA to observe and adjust the antenna once erected.

Like many other VK hams, I really enjoy watching VK3YE’s You Tube videos, particularly when he heads to the beach and operates portable…it was this video that started me on the journey for this antenna…if Peter’s antenna worked ok on 20M why not try one one of these on 40M at my place?

For those unfamiliar with a Half Square, the easiest way to describe it, is to think of a single staple, like you would find holding a couple of sheets of paper together.

That hasn’t been used yet!

Now orientate it so the pointy points, point at the ground!

So as you can see in the above screen shot from the Mmana Gal software, here is a diagram of the  antenna. It is simply 2 1/4 wave verticals on 40M joined by a 1/2 wavelength wire at the top. This diagram show it being fed at the top corner (the small red circle) this is a 50 ohm direct feed point, great electrically, but it’s not very convenient to feed it here as *ideally* you have to get heavy coax to this point and lead it away at 90 degrees for a 1/4 wavelength…not very practical…Other more obscure feed methods are feasible, and you can find them on the internet or in good antenna books if you look hard enough. Perhaps the best way to feed it is at the bottom of one of the vertical wires, far more practical, but tricky electrically!  Nothings easy is it? Using the software, we can see in theory how the antenna will perform when fed with RF at our chosen frequency, at the place we want to feed it…

So let’s run model of the antenna in the software. I’ve told Mmana Gal to feed it in a top corner…

This image above shows the antenna radiation pattern. The diagram on the left shows the antenna, looking down directly on top of it. You can see that the long halfwave section going from left to right, the feedpoint (red dot) is shown for reference. The diagram on the right shows the results of the modeling and the elevation pattern. We can see here, that at our design frequency of 7.074 Mhz (for FT8), the Gain is 4.31dB over an isotropic radiator, there is a 0dB front to back ratio as it’s radiating equally well in 2 directions, the  impedance at the feedpoint is very close to 50 ohms and that the reactance is very nearly 0 Ohms. I made the lowest point of each the 2 vertical radiators 250 mm from the ground, as I wanted there to be sufficient room without having the feed point in the dirt.

Let look and see what happens if we feed the antenna at the bottom of one of the vertical radiators…this is far more convenient…

We can see here that comparing the 2 diagrams, the only real change at our 7.074 Mhz design frequency is the resistance at the feedpoint is now at 3250 Ohms with LOTS of reactance. Other important parameters like elevation angle, gain and vertical radiation remains virtually the same.

So there we have it, here are the plots of the radiation patterns, first, horizontal polarisation and then Vertical polarisation…this indicates that at least some of our vertically polarised radiated power should head towards the horizon at around 23.3 degrees. There seems to be very little Horizontally polarised radiation, and what little there is, is going straight up to warm clouds. Vertically polarised radiation, at a low angle towards the horizon, is what we want.

OK so now we have to put power into the antenna. How can we do this so that the maximum power is transmitted by the antenna?

What we have here is basically an End Fed antenna, in this case on our design frequency of 7.074Mhz, it’s a full wave (1/4,+1/2,+1/4 =1) End Fed. Steve, AA5TB explains all about the End Fed antenna in this link way better than I can…Another way to describe the antenna is an 80 Metre End Fed Half Wave.

So we need to transform the high impedance, in this case 3520 ohms (at the base of one of our 1/4 wave legs) to 50 ohms so our Transmitter is happy to deliver full power.

We could use a matching Transformer, like the popular 1:49 or 1:64 transformers that many hams are using with end fed antenna these days. See here for the lowdown on the transformer construction. A 3 turn Primary and 24 turn secondary version (roughly 1:64) works well with this antenna on the bands that are multiples of a half wave. In this case, 80 – 10M. This is convenient if you just want to push the tuner button on the rig when you change bands, but you sacrifice efficiency and the radiation pattern has many more sharp lobes and deep nulls, with increasing Horizontal radiation at high angles away from the design frequency. That’s not good for DX.

I chose to feed the Half Square as a single band antenna on 40M with a parallel resonant circuit. This is quite efficient and ensures the maximum power is transferred to the radiating element rather than heating a ferrite core in a broadband matching transformer.

John, M0UKD, has an excellent website on how he made a matching unit for his 15M 1/2 wave vertical antenna. I used the information from that site and the calculations to come up with my own matching unit, shown below. I used an old capacitor and coil section I had in my junk box and finished up with this unit. Not as pretty as his, but it certainly does the job…(hot melt glue for the win!)

Ok, so now we have a design, we have a way of matching it and we have plenty of time on our hands in self isolation to put it up…

I positioned the antenna in the back yard, the height of the two vertical supports are around 11 metres each. It fits nicely in between the two side boundaries of my average size block. Here is one of the vertical radiators,  both supports are lash ups of broken squid pole sections and ally/steel tube sections I had kept/salvaged for projects just like this…never throw anything out!

Here you can clearly see the 90 degree transition to the 1/2 wave phasing wire…

…to the other Vertical radiator at the other end of the antenna.

Here is the feed point, here I’ve temporarily strapped the matching unit and a 1:64 Transformer to the stake for testing until I come up with a more permanent setup. The capacitor in the matchbox can be adjusted so that X=0 on an Aerial Analyser or vector network Analyser.

So how do you adjust something like this? how do you know it’s doing its thing?

Ok, lets go with what we know. We want the antenna to be resonant at 7.074 (in this case for FT8 mode on 40M) so we want a low SWR reading on this frequency and we also want the resistance as close to 50 Ohms as possible with a reactance close to 0 as well, to make our transceiver sing, and develop full power to the antenna.

I was actually quite gobsmacked at what I was seeing on the VNA. This is one of the first readings I took,  I set it to have a centre frequency of 7.075 Mhz with a 1 Mhz span. (this was straight after adjusting the capacitor in the matching box to peak the noise on RX with my FT817 Transceiver). This is what the VNA showed first up. The SWR is 1 to 1.16, the Resistance is 58 ohms with 24.nF of reactance. The frequency is shown as 7.005 Mhz. Moving the marker (the little triangles on the VNA screen) so the reactance is very close to 0, (resonance) showed a frequency of around 7.050 Mhz. So if we’re splitting hairs, the antenna is a fraction too long. The Mmana Gal model prediction seemed pretty spot on. I would only need to make minor adjustments to the lengths of the vertical radiators to shorten the antenna to raise the resonant frequency to 7.074 Mhz

These numbers makes our Transmitter very happy to deliver full power to the antenna, no tuner (internal or external) needed…

OK so the $64.000 question, does it work? Well yes, it certainly seems to!

I have the antenna orientated north/south, so it is radiating pretty much east west.

The antenna went up on the 2nd of May 2020 at around 5:00pm local time here in South Australia, here are the first few contacts on the antenna after calling CQ on 7.075 Mhz. 1st up is VK3FAC, who was receiving me at +10dB

Then followed by the USA,  Robert, K9U0 in Portland Oregon with a -13 report…nice, looks promising…

Then the friggen DOMINICAN REPUBLIC answers my CQ call!!! Migue HI3MPC with a -22 report…very nice!

Next? CUBA! Eduardo C07EPP answers at -17…Then I think I had to go have a lie down!! Here is a snippet from my log…

The contact circled in green, with Slovenia is actually on 20M when I was testing the antenna with a 1:49 transformer to see if my radio would tune it on all bands from 80 to 10M with the rigs internal tuner, via the broadband 1:49 transformer…th 30, 17 and 12 Metre bands won’t match which isn’t surprising as they aren’t a multiple of 80, 40, 20 or 10…

So yes, it certainly seems to get out, and in the direction the modelling said it would.

I’ve worked 158 qso’s 19 DXCC entities so far in the 9 days as of 11/5/20 since the antenna has been up. I certainly do ok in the direction of the USA, Canada, the Carribean and Africa. An added bonus is the antenna is very quiet noise wise on RX, and the lack of horizontally polarised high angle qrm signals from Indonesia is noticeable. Also, I don’t get many JA stations returning my CQ calls as well, when before they were in plague proportions…this further reinforced the radiation pattern is favoring east/west.

So there you have it, I have described my journey with the Half Square antenna. I’m very impressed, I’m working stations I could only hope to before! I intend to try a portable version for 20M fairly soon, either near some salt water or a lake, as soon as these bloody social distancing rules are relaxed.

Happy Hamming, Andy, VK5LA

The globe is certainly experiencing unprecedented difficulties and hardship in modern times. There is little doubt there will be much anguish and uncertainty for a long time to come.

The Riverland Radio Club is very mindful of the strain this is and will place on our radio community. Like many radio clubs many of our members fall into the vulnerable category for a variety of reasons.

To this end our Club has opted to suspend ALL Club face to face contact, including Business Meetings and Tech Nights, to play our small part in flattening the curve. We recognise this action increases the sense of isolation which we feel is in conflict with mental well-being.

So to support our members though this uncertain time we have committed to undertake the following:

• Business Meetings for Club members to convened over the VK5RLD repeater;
• Tech Nights replaced with a 80m (3650kHz) Net, all welcome;
• Members, and all comers, are encouraged to join the WIA News Re-broadcast call backs; and
• Check into the RRC BRL Nets
  • Sat & Wed, 7115kHz, 0830hrs local
  • Tue, 3610kHz, 2000hrs local).

To all the HAM community, stay safe, stay well, stay vigilant.

Danny VK5DW

POSTPONED   POSTPONED   POSTPONED

RRC regrets to advise the postponement of the RRC BRL Gathering

Saturday, 18th of April, 2020

Ok Folks, come one come all, it’s on again, the BRL Gathering for 2020 is on Saturday, the 6th of April, at the same sensational location, famous for its picturesque setting, Fantastic Hospitality, Great Food and Cold Beer.

DUE TO COVID 19 RISK THE GATHERING HAS BEEN POSTPONED TILL FURTHER NOTICE

Lunch –  Lunch at the Hotel is a must! Check out the menu and get your taste buds excited for April. The Hotel’s food is renowned for its quality and value!

*Dogs are welcome at the Overland corner Hotel*

Building this antenna came about after I wanted to put something up at home specifically targeting 20M FT8 on 14.074 Mhz.

The 3/8 wave vertical for 20m in my front yard…

I’m fairly time poor so I needed something quick, simple and cheap to get going with asap. Whilst doing a bit of research I came across the winners of the 2018 QST Antenna Design Competition, and interestingly, third place was a 3/8 wave vertical for 20M by Joe Reiart, W1JR. As I’m not an ARRL member, I asked if anyone in my HAM community  would be kind enough to let me have a copy of the article. Several people kindly sent it to me.

Surprisingly, there is virtually nothing on the internet about a practical example about this antenna. I did find an old reference to the antenna, but no solid build details.

In a nutshell, according to the article, the 3/8 wave vertical has the advantage of requiring less radials than your standard 1/4 wave, but is about 50% taller for the same band. A 1/4 wave vertical requires at least 16 1/4 wave radials for good performance due to the low feed point impedance of around 35 ohms, whilst the 3/8 wave requires just 4, having a feed impedance of around 200 ohms. It also sports a lower take off angle of radiation of 23°,  vs 26° for a 1/4 wave (better for DX), and as the radiating current maximum point is 1/8 wave up the vertical instead of at ground level, it is ideal for ground mounting in situations of nearby clutter. It is easy to match to 50 ohms Coax via a simple 4:1 Unun and a series capacitor.

The materials…

I decided to go with a squid pole for the vertical radiator, as they are cheap and easy to keep in the air, so I purchased a 6M pole to which I added 2 base sections from older broken squid poles to bring me up to 7.5m in length. This size slides neatly over 38mm PVC pipe, which is the diameter of my portable stand mount that I use for field work. I also had to purchase the 2, FT240-61 Ferrite cores for the Unun and choke, ( I got mine from Minikits in Adelaide) and a box for the Unun (Jaycar) at the feed point. So for less than $100 I was ready to go.

The Unun…

The 4:1 Unun…

This turned out to be very straight forward, and is explained in the article. There is quite a bit online about 4:1 Ununs, I’m sure you’ll have no drama constructing your own. I used Jaycar red and white power cable cat. No. WH3057, I stripped off the black outer PVC sheath and lightly twisted the wires in a drill, then wound on the FT240-61 ferrite core to get the result shown in the above pic…

The In-line choke…

The article is fairly vague on this describing it as 10- 12 turns of RG-303 wound “W1JR style” A quick Google returned lots of hits for this, and you can see my resultant choke in the pic…I used RG-316, as it was what I had lying around.

The W1JR choke…

Mounting it…

By now, I had gathered all the materials I needed so it was time to put the antenna together and see if it did what it was supposed to do.

I initially mounted the antenna on one of my ALDI bike stands as that’s what I normally use for testing and portable operating but my initial tests showed there was a LOT of interaction with the stands metal base/legs and support and the antenna. Readings on the antenna analyser were nothing like I was expecting and confirmed when I moved the Unun away from the base, the readings began to move towards something more like I was expecting.

So I then decided to shift the whole shebang to my PVC vertical antenna mount in my front yard…

This is simply a length of PVC pipe driven into the ground and about 600mm protruding out to mount antennas on, with a short extension that the squid pole just slips over…simple! The pictures below show how…

PVC pole mount

I set the whole thing up, with the vertical wire length calculated to 8.010 metres in length and the matching unit lying on the ground with the 4 radials connected. This showed the 50 ohm point to be around 13.8Mhz, so I shortened the antenna to raise the 50 ohm point to 14.075 MHz. I had a variable capacitor in between the unun and vertical, so I adjusted this capacitor to bring the X=12 reading on the analyser to zero. This measured at 7pf, close to the 10pf mentioned in the article…

Gotta be happy with that!

The squid pole ended up being about 7.5 m in length, so the vertical wire and match box at about 7.8m hung just nicely just above the ground on the mount. You can see the match box with its coax capacitor, how the choke ( to keep RF of the coax outer) connects to the match box and where the 4 radials attach…

I only had a brief opportunity to have a listen with the FT817 on the antenna, and the receive was very lively, especially on the frequency of interest. SWR was flat, with the radio developing full power on TX.

I’ll update this article when I’ve had a chance to evaluate the antenna on the air…

Andy, VK5LA

Reference: The 3/8-Wavelength Vertical – A Hidden Gem. Joe Reisert, W1JR P44 QST April 2019.