Well it’s been a long summer already.  This spring, a strong windstorm came through and knocked down my OCF Windom dipole antenna, an antenna that I had been having marginal success operating worldwide with.  I’d made several DX contacts, but the issue was the placement of the antenna, it went directly over the house and picked up about a solid S6-S7 of RFI simply by being that close to all the electronics in a home.  Suffice it to say I got lots of good signal reports of S9 but routinely would need to have a station repeat their call several times during contests.

When the wind took down the antenna I decided this would be a good chance to take a break and concentrate on getting my VHF/UHF situation upgraded.  Since I’ve completed that and have a new antenna mounted on the house (a future blog post I’m sure) my focus has shifted back to HF.  Of course I’ve missed field day, and there aren’t many contests in the summer, but it doesn’t hurt to prepare early.

To avoid the RFI issues from the past I wanted to make sure this antenna would be as far as possible from the homes in the neighborhood.  This means mounting it in the back yard and it also means that I’m stuck with a vertical antenna.  Vertical antennas have many strengths, but they come with a set of complications such as narrow bandwidth, high takeoff angle (which is great for DX but makes ground wave operation pretty much nonexistant) and (most problematic for me) grounding issues.

There are lots of different choices for HF Vertical antennas, and I won’t go into each choice here, but suffice it to say that the trapped dipole design was pretty much the only one I can afford (others require a tuner installed at the antenna and I just purchased an indoor autotuner) and also it is shorter than the untrapped versions (which means free standing, non-guyed).

I ordered a 5BTV 1/4 wave vertical antenna from DX Engineering capable of operation on 80m 40m 20m 15m and 10m.  My concern is grounding this antenna, you need a nice field of ground wires stretched across the ground.  In about 90 degrees that won’t be a problem, but in the other directions a chain link fence and property lines block me pretty good.  I’m hoping to actually tie in to the ground by using the chain link fence, time will tell if this will work or not.

Fortunately I have this week off from work; unfortunately it’s going to be hot, damp, and the package won’t be delivered until Thursday or Friday.  At least that will give me plenty of time to pull the old Dish 1000.2 off the mount (where this antenna will go) and to run some of the grounding lines ahead of time.

More to come as I’m sure to document this project and post it here.

Photo to the right: Picture of 5BTV antenna installed @ K2PJW

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