Recently I have expanded the antennas I have available to use for my portable activities.
The Current Antennas
My first one was the EFHW (End Fed Half Wave) which is more suitable for longer periods of operating. This is because of the time and equipment needed to set it up. Base, Base Supports, Fiberglas pole, Wire, Tape, Balun and then in bad weather guying it all up.
My Second antenna was the ‘HamStick’ for 20m which sits on the magmount on the car for a quick setup and take down. This has proven very effective making contacts over to the Americas from various locations.
The New Antenna
So the new antenna is somewhere in the middle. Quicker to setup but not as compromised as the ham stick on the car. It is also a multi band antenna.
This time I have gone with the 17.5ft Telescopic antenna. This is available in many forms but I got mine from Moonraker. I also got a few little bits in order to make a ground spike to support it.
So First of all I had to make some ground radials. For this I used 8x lengths of speaker wire, with 2 lengths terminated into one eyelet to make 4x sets of radials. Each length is approximately 3.3m (10.8ft) Long.
Finally with some good weather I set it up on the back lawn to get a record of the differing lengths required for each band.
I Just managed to fit the radials into the confines of the garden but having it just short of fully extended achieved a nice resonance on 20m with an SWR of 1.12.
I then repeated this process down all the bands all the way to 10m with the future opportunity of getting down to the 4m (70MHz) band. There is also the possibility of adding a Wolf River Coil to enable 40-80m.
20m used 11 Sections
17m used 7 section
15m used 6 sections
12m used 4 and a bit sections
10m used 3 and a bit sections