The European Ham Radio Show

#017: Strange Antenna Design

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On the premiere episode on its own channel, the crew tries to talk about strange and unusual antennas. And are in fact fairly successful. The show starts of with the entire crew agreeing that Morten LB0FI is still the captain; especially when it comes to dealing with the tax-man. Kjetil LB4FH is on his way back from the Summits on the Air Norway get together this week. 10 activators showed up for chatting, eating, drinking and of course activating summits. They even managed to put up the portable shack (tent) over the track on the summit. Which turns out to be a good way of raising questions about what’s going on. Walt K4OGO has been playing with a 29′ vertical “random” wire by the shore. Bob LB5JJ has tried out putting petrol in his diesel powered car, and does not recommend it. He has also managed to activate LA/BU-108 and LA/TM-043 and release a de-boxing video of the vacuum variable capacitor for his future magnetic loop experiments. Tobias DL3MHT has had his hands full herding cats (well to be truthful only one cat) while putting the finishing touches on his microphone adapter for the Insta360 and winding transformers for his EFHW antenna. Morten’s been building his EFHW-kit and swearing at his All-Star node until it started working. He’s now QRV on All-Star with ID 54817. There’s much talk of the rumours of a new Xiegu radio. Bob thinks it’s all a hoax, and Walt promise that if the new radio isn’t at least 20W, he’ll switch to Yaesu for good. But we all agree it could be a nice radio, and that whatever else it is, we hope they keep the legendary Xiegu built-in tuner. On the topic of strange and unusual antennas, we talk about slot antennas in their many incarnations (lots of links below) and also about small loop antennas. We all agree that what you learn from building antennas is just as important as the qualities of the finished product. Kjetil also shares how he managed to tune the guy wire of a lookout tower on an activation where he’d forgotten his antenna. And there are stories of tuning up metallic fences and even a huge metal elk. Tobias shares the Crazy Ham ToyTube channel and also show the design for the “umbrella” antenna. Kjetil confirms having seen an antenna like that only this week, but declines to share more information on the grounds of national security. Kjetil also tells of the enormous antenna sites used by the old Rogaland Radio station, with the RX and TX antenna fields are separated by as much as 50km. Walt suggest setting up a vertical over the old radial fields of the Rogaland Radio antennas. And Morten and Kjetil talks about the Grimeton Radio site in Sweden.

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