The humble dipole is really a great antenna

Because my hexbeam is still down and awaiting repair, I have been using wire dipoles and my Antron 99 to make QSOs. But I had no resonant antenna on 20 metres and was badly missing the action on that "bread and butter" band.

The apex of my inverted vees. The short one is the new 20m dipole, with homebrew insulators made from PVC chopping board!

So I recently added a 20m dipole to my nest of inverted vees. Previously, I had three vees, one for 80m, one for 40m and one for 30m. When I added the 20m dipole, I was surprised and perhaps a little annoyed to find that it was not resonant. Its inclusion in the nest did not seem to upset the VSWR on the other bands too much, thankfully, but with an SWR of 7:1 on 14Mhz, it simply was not effective and not radiating efficiently at all.

Astonishingly, I did not have an antenna analyzer. It's a piece of equipment that every shack should have but it's something I had never invested in. During a conversation with some fellow DXers on a WhatsApp group, I got chatting with John EI3ISB, who kindly offered not only to give me a MINI60S analyzer which was surplus to his requirements, but also to come to my home and help me analyze the 20m dipole and either extend it or trim it to resonance.

A wider view of the inverted vee dipoles. 

Yesterday morning, Saturday, John arrived and within a short time we found that my 20m inverted vee dipole was resonant on 15.67Mhz – way above where it needed to be. I still do not know how this happened, except that I must have been using the wrong online dipole calculator or else I made a mistake in trimming the two legs. Either way, the antenna needed to be LENGTHENED. And not just by a few centimetres, but actually by about 50cm.

I lowered the dipoles down using the pulley rope and we quickly got to work on adding a piece to each leg before hoisting the whole lot back into the air again.

A quick check with the analyzer revealed that resonance was achieved towards the top of the 20 metre band, at around 14.300Mhz. I lowered the pulley rope again and added another 5cm or so (a couple of inches) on each leg and raised the dipoles again.

This time, resonance was around 14.100Mhz, which is pretty good. I do a lot of digital modes, and prefer CW to SSB, so this was a more than acceptable point of resonance.

John left and I was grateful for all his help. I was finally operating properly on 20 metres! I had a very rewarding day on the band, working DX on FT8 in most parts of the world.

A screenshot from PSKreporter.info showing where my 20m signal has been heard during the past 24 hours.

I hope you can see from the above screenshot that the dipole has been very effective in carrying my signal to various parts of the world. I see that I was heard in the Falkland Islands, in Alaska and in Kenya. In fact, I worked 5Z4VJ in Kenya using FT4 yesterday evening. Other DX stations worked included several JA ops, YB0MWM in Indonesia, BG0BBB and BD7BS in China, ZP9MCE in Paraguay, A45XR in Oman, LU8EKC in Argentina, 9Y4DG in Trinidad and Tobago, YV5JLO in Venezuela, along with several stations in the United States and Canada.

The global reach of a small ham radio station

I don't care what anybody says. FT8 is a wonderful mode for those with modest antenna systems. Again I looked at PSKreporter.info and again I find that the pursuit of DX stations has been fruitful with relatively low power (generally 20 to 50 watts) and wire and vertical antennas.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Above is a map from PSKreporter showing where my FT8 signal has been decoded around the world in the last 24 hours. I am impressed. Now I do love a CW QSO, and I am also fond of phone/SSB contacts, but FT8 is convenient, quiet and you can be running QSOs while doing other things in the shack.

Most of the action today was on 17 metres, using my Antron 99 vertical antenna and 40 to 50 watts output. The best of the DX there were several JA stations who answered my CQ, a HS (Thailand) station, A65DR in the UAE, and two VU (India) stations along with a clatter of callers from the USA.

Just to demonstrate that I do not spend my whole time on the air using FT8, I did have a couple of CW QSOs. One, with Hans DL8MCG near Munich, was recorded on my smartphone. You can view the entire QSO on YouTube here:

In this video, I was running 100 watts from the radio.

By the way, I should finish by saying that I was not decoded in Australia today. In fact, it's been a while since my last QSO with VK, so I am looking forward to hearing the VK (or indeed ZL / New Zealand) call coming through at some point, hopefully soon.

PS: I have been uploading my log to Logbook of the World every two to three days. I was delighted to see that a contact I made with a station in China (BG0CAB) late last night was confirmed this morning.

Winter is coming and it's time for 80 metres!

Birds on a wire . . . Starlings sitting on the apex of my
inverted V system. The 30/40/80 legs are perpendicular to
each other. I trimmed the 80 v for resonance at 3.510.

I know it's still only September. And yes, the weather has been largely very good here in Ireland. We are getting an Indian summer. However, the days are getting shorter rapidly. It's past the equinox now, and as the days contract in length, it's time to start thinking about winter and the lower bands. Yesterday evening, having analysed my nest of V dipoles, I could see that my 80m inverted V was resonant at 3.4 Mhz. Too low. It needed to be shortened. So I trimmed some wire off each end and got it beautifully resonant on 3.510 Mhz. Nice! Time for some winter time DXing on 80 metres.

Yesterday morning, I managed a QSO with YV8AD on the upper part of the band using 100 watts. Hopefully I will be able to work some DX on SSB in future as I now find that even on the upper part of the band the antenna has an SWR of around 4:1. I know this is technically too high, but it means it can be tuned fairly easily, and I might get a few hundred watts out with the linear.

I took this screenshot immediately after working HC2AO on 80 metres.
As you can see, I was almost exactly on the greyline.

I got up at 6am today in the hope that Nigel ZD9XF would be on either 40 or 80 metres from Tristan Da Cunha. Unfortunately he was QRT. So I decided instead to see what DX was "on offer" HI HI. I worked PJ5/OL8R with 100 watts on 80 cw. That was a handy contact. Then 8R1AE popped up from Guyana on 40m CW as a potential new one so I started chasing him. That turned into a mammoth affair as I battled with all the German, French, Czech and other European stations. It was tough going. He is a slow op on the CW key, but had a steady rate and managed the pile-up without too much fuss. At around 7.15am local time, I saw on the Reverse Beacon Network that HC2AO was CQing on 3.504 Mhz. I went straight down there like a shot, but could hear nothing. Damn. Had I missed him again, for a second morning in a row? Then the RBN spotted him again, this time on 3.508. Up I went and sure enough, there he was. He tried to work a SM station several times but eventually had to give up. We were approaching greyline. I knew this was the perfect moment. I pounced with "EI2KC". Immediately he came back with "EI2KC 5NN BK". I gave him the usual five nine nine and I was in the log. Another new one on 80 metres, and it's not even winter yet! That's country #147 on 80.

I went back to 40m to chase the 8R1. It took a long while, but eventually at 7.50am I managed to get him in the log. I think one new one on 80 and one new one on 40 is a very good result for an early morning. I can see myself going to bed early and setting the alarm for 6am more often during the coming winter. It can be very rewarding.

Video: patience pays off and Brazilian special event call logged

I was listening to a Brazilian special event station, ZZ80PR, on 40 metres tonight. After the crazy European pile-up had died down, I noticed that he was a bit stronger on my Butternut vertical than on my 40m inverted v dipole. So I decided to sit tight and give him a call . . .

Emergency disentanglement required after storm!

Jim EI2HJB uses binoculars to see how
badly entangled the rope was.

You might not be able to see properly in this image, but the storm of St. Stephen's Day which lasted through the night into December 27th caused a strange situation to emerge with my antenna system. A rope from the hexbeam became dislodged from its position and somehow managed to get entangled with one of the legs of my inverted v dipole system. When I woke yesterday morning the first thing I did was to check the antennas because the storm was really ferocious. A large number of trees were blown down in my region, in Louth and Meath. In Ireland over 50,000 homes were without power for a time after electricity lines were blown down. We have had a number of storms this winter, but this latest one certainly was the worst.

Anyway, I called my friends into action and they duly obliged by making themselves available at 10am this morning (Saturday, 28th), to help retrieve the situation. Thankfully, none of the antennas was actually broken, but I was unable to turn the hexbeam without causing something to break, and I was anxious to get it sorted out.

Jim EI2HJB, Fintan EI7CEB and Pat EI2HX all arrived to help. It was a delicate operation. While we could lower the inverted v system, which is on a rope and pulley, the problem was that the rope from the hexbeam was very much tangled up in the 80m inverted v and wouldn't let us lower it down. Using binoculars, we could see that the entanglement was severe. The rope somehow got knotted up quite well by the wind!

The eventual solution was to lower the hexbeam slightly and to rotate it so that Fintan EI7CEB could get into a position on a ladder to reach the knotted rope. This sounds simple, but it involved taking the stay wires off the hexbeam's supporting pole, and also loosening the pole from its brackers. After about an hour or so, we finally had the knot opened and I had to get up onto the shack roof to reattach the rope to its correct spreader on the hexbeam. Then we had to right the pole again and re-attach all the stays, plus the 80m inverted v had to be reattached to its support. All in all, a tough job but we got there in the end!

Reverse Beacon Network reports for my 80m inverted v

Last night I decided to see how my signal was getting out on my new 80m dog-legged inverted v antenna. I put out a CQ on 3.150 Mhz and waited to see what the reports were like on the Reverse Beacon Network (RBN), which is a network of automated skimmer stations automatically spotting what they hear on the bands on the CW mode. 

I was quite impressed with the results. I was being heard in different parts of Europe, including Germany, Norway, Sweden, Hungary and Slovenia. Indeed I have worked a couple of stations in the USA using just 100 watts. The inverted v is definitely hearing better than my Butternut HF6V, but I am in a housing estate and the band is still quite noisy. I have made a few contacts on 160m (top band), although due to the low apex height of about 9 metres or so (30ft), I suspect that I won't be making many contacts on top band, where the nested v system (80m/40m/30m) has a 3:1 SWR at the bottom end of 160m. However, I will hope to enjoy a nice bit of activity on 80m CW during the winter months. I still have the Butternut in place, and it is currently tuned to the top end of 80m, so I can try to enjoy the best of both worlds!!

The challenges of 80 metre operation from a small garden

Regular readers of this blog will already know that I operate from a small garden. You will all know that this hasn't prevented or deterred me from working DXCC on every band from 80 metres through 10 metres. My lowly Butternut HF6V, which is 26 feet tall, and ground mounted in a corner of the garden near the wall, has enabled me to operate in a limited capacity on 80m. Through last winter, especially as a result of my participation in the CQWW CW contest in late November, I was able to finally get 100 countries confirmed on that band on LoTW.

But I have never been able to enjoy good operation on 80m because the Butternut is too short and therefore limited in what it can hear. It gets out reasonably well for the DX stations, and the low angle of radiation definitely helps.

A photograph of my nested inverted vees, with labels.

Just this week, I decided to put back up the 80m inverted V, off the same feedpoint as the Vees on 30m and 40m. From previous experience, I knew this would involve some serious dog-legging. (For non amateurs, this means making the wire antenna "turn a corner", so to speak, because there isn't enough room for a straight run of wire that's 66 feet long on each leg. One leg - the "reflector" - is able to get a run down along the side of the house, as far as the gate pillar at the front, although about three feet of it still needs to be dog legged.

The other leg - the "transmit" leg - runs down above the back wall of the garden, and then dog-legs up the side wall of the garden to a point at the back wall of the house under the eave. From there, it is dog-legged again by about three feet and tied off. And the mast (insert word "pole" here!) is only 30 feet at the apex.

It's far from ideal, I know. I bet some of you are trying to picture this all in your head and wondering how I've managed to defy the laws of physics, and indeed the laws of effective radiation of RF fields. So how's it working?

The reflector leg of the 80m inverted v dipole runs down
between the houses and is tied off (dog-legged) at a gate pillar.

Here's a summary of the contacts made last night on CW using just 100 watts: PI4EME, US8UX, EI3HMB, HA5OV, IK6DIN, YU9CF, EI6IL, F5TVG/P, HB9FBA, EI7BA, S51FZ, GM3ZLC, EI2EO, UT8MM, G4LEM, PA1MUC and HB30OK. So it's getting out, as far as Ukraine. Hardly a comprehensive test of its abilities, but the reports coming back were generally 579 or 599 or 599 plus! The previous morning, I had worked N8NA on 100w on CW, so that wasn't bad either, but it's likely that he's got bigger antennas than me.

Time will tell if it's up to the job of making more distant contacts. I will run 400 watts when conditions improve and the band quietens a bit - the QRN here can be s9 at times.

Interestingly, the 80/40/30m nested V system also has some resonance on the lower portion of the 160m band. When I say "some", I mean about 3:1 at best, maybe 3.5:1. It might allow me a limited amount of operation on that band over the next couple of months. I may figure out a way to tune it better for 160m. We will see.

In the meantime, I will keep you posted as to the performance of this compromise antenna system.