HAM Radio

Well it has been over 4 months since I installed the 5BTV antenna here at home.  I have logged over 200 contacts to North America, Europe, and Africa with this antenna.  I have contested with the antenna and cleared pileups on the second try (routinely) running only 100W.  Let me say, this update is well overdue.  My opinions on this antenna have done nothing but improve with some minor work done by this operator.

First of all, let me stress that this is an antenna you should be putting thought in to.  It’s not a simple dipole antenna you can set up in a day and use.  You need to plan out your radials well in advance.  If you opt to do like I do, you can use a trenching shovel to bury them easy.  What I did was make a long groove in the yard with the trenching shovel.  Just push the earth apart in to a V shape.  Then, run along with the wire and something plastic to push it down in the V.  Finally, walk along the sides of the V to push it back together.

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One of the things I have begun to expieriment with lately is using RG6 coax for HF radio.  Where I installed my new 5BTV antenna I had already buried 8 RG6 lines for a previous Dish Network dish.  Rather than pull this coax out and rerun RG8x I figured I would give it a shot, as the loss is quite negligible at the HF frequencies.

I wasn’t sure if the impedance mismatch would cause issues, but my tuner was able to bring it up without issue.  I have been using this for quite some time now without any complaints.  The tuner brings it to 1.5:1 on the radio side quite nicely and my signal gets out good.

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Well the new 5BTV antenna arrived on Thursday, and after much work and fiddling I have it installed.  The results are, mixed, at best.

First of all, my original idea to ground to the fence is out.  There is too much noise carried on the fence, and it doesn’t seem to add any ground at all, just noise.  So, if I’m going to be using this antenna long term I’m going to be installing ground radials.

Secondly, the noise floor isn’t that much lower than I expected.  Here is a QSO I recorded of CJ6POP out of Canada.  As you can see the background noise on 20M is about an S6:

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Driving across town this morning I noticed something interesting; a “local” FM radio station was being overpowered by a country station (never managed to catch enough to get a call, but possibly from central IL) .

Because of the way the radio spectrum works, ducting (carrying VHF radio signals long distances in the atmosphere before returning them to earth) starts at lower frequencies and works it way up.

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