Adventures in Antennas (The Random Wire)

Adventures with Antennas

The Random wire

From my previous post, I was experimenting in a random wire antenna. The first thing I needed was a 9:1 UnUn to get the antenna impedances to a range the autotuner can handle. I followed the blog entry Magnetic Longwire Balun which worked out very well. 

The main ingredient was 10.6Mtrs of wire,a 6M telescoping fiberglass pole and some bungee straps to fix the pole to the fence-post.

Right next to the antenna is a metal fence, which I dont like! so I opted to elevate the base of the antenna to the top of the fence post. It was convenient as the counterpoise was the actual fence. 

You will notice that the black pole is leaning forward as I wanted the the last 4 meters to be a pseudo-V shape.

The antenna analyser shows that the antenna being quite poor in the frequencies I want to use; which is good.

Surprisingly it show that it will work okay from 18Mhz.. well barely!

The performance

Connecting to the LDG Z-11 Pro tuner, it had no problem of reducing the SWR to 1.5 and below. 

Firing up WSPR and running the radio at a massive 2 watts - I was impressed with the spots; considering it was made in 10 minutes at my dismal skill level.

The random wire will not win any awesome propagation awards, but as a compromise antenna it does the trick.

Adventures with Antennas - Dipole [Previous]