[Antennas] Dipole on deck

2002年3月18日 23:01:30 -0500

I want to thank everyone for the great suggestions. What I did (realizing that I can always fool with it), is to run the wire along the wood railing on the deck. this puts the 
antenna about 15 feet above the ground. Once again, the ground slopes down away from the deck, so I don't know how far above ground the antenna will "think" it is. 
I only say that, because I have heard/read that depending on the type of soil you have, antennas may act differently. I really don't know about that. 
what I did was run the antenna along the railing, following the turns and bends of the railing. Now, contrary to some good advice, I did put in a couple of staples. The 
antenna wire is insulated, but I did get the impression that perhaps having the wire too close to the wood might affect antenna output. I have a bunch of wire fence 
insulators in the barn (believe it or not, I actually do use a wire fence to keep the dogs away from the horse and donkey). The way to go is to use them. But, first we 
have to get past the XYL factor, and I felt that making it as least visible as possible initially was worth a little decrease in performance. I also use very thin wire. Just some 
thin solid hookup wire from radio shack. I will probably repace it with some stranded como wire that has a black coating. The hookup wire is red. 
I still have to run the coax into the house (the bedroom), where the cable used to go. I will use the mini 8 stuff. 
I have a FT 101 that, believe it or not, I got about 5 or 6 years ago, new in the box. And I just don't use it. My plan is to set it up on the nightstand and work some old 
fashion 40 meters CW with it. Because it is a tube radio, I should be able to get away without a tuner, even if I don't get the antenna exactly right. I just wanted not to 
have too much stuff that would get knocked over by the cats, so I was hoping to do without a tuner. I do have an antenna analyzer, so I can at least see what the 
antenna reads. If I wanted to go onto 20 meters, I imagine that I could just run a couple legs of 16 feet wire right next to the 33 feet wires, or do you have to space the 
different legs of wires when you do a multiband dipole? 
What I wanted was a stand alone antenna. I was thinking also of trying the antenna that is composed of a 130 foot long wire, with the several counterpoises. different 
lengths for different bands. Named after someone's call starting with a W. I thought that might be a nice antenna to string from the deck going up to the tower or some 
trees. 
One other thing, the dipole runs north to south, but I bet that because it is so low it is most likely omnidirectional anyway. It will be interesting to see how it works. I will 
probably get it going this weekend when I get the coax into the house and the connectors on them. 
Thanks again, Joe N8TI