Antenna plans have changed...

Antenna plans have changed at the new house...

When I started to look at the best route for a full wave loop I noticed that it was going to be pretty difficult to route the wire the way I wanted to (which would have involved getting on a high, steep roof and maybe climbing several trees). With that I decided to try a random wire. It'll run about 20 feet off the ground and will be "L" shaped horizontally with  the main leg about 140-150' and the short leg 50-60' with the total length targeted to avoid 1/2 wave multiples of all bands from 10-80 meters. As is best practice with wire antennas I'll start with more wire and trim as needed. It would be a lot of trouble and somewhat undesirable to install a counterpoise and/or radial system and/or a tuner located right at the feed point outside the shack. Instead I'm going to use a 4:1 current balun (fed with a few feet of coax from the tuner in the shack) right at the feed point with the other side grounded to a dedicated ground rod. I know that is not an ideal installation but I'm going to give it a try.

My old setup on VHF/UHF, as previously mentioned, was a ground plane mounted above a 4 element Yagi with the Yagi direction fixed. At the new house I want the Yagi to rotate as I'm too far from most of the local repeaters to hit them on an omnidirectional antenna. Both antennas are currently mounted on a 10 foot section of Radio Shack TV antenna mast. The plan was to just sit that on top of a rotator and away we go. As I looked at that more two problems became evident: one is that two antennas and 10 feet of mast is too much to sit on top of a cheap rotator; the second is that in order to get the Yagi clear of my roof line the whole works is going to have to be a lot higher than I originally planned. I don't have an immediate need to get these antennas up so for the time being I'm going to focus on getting on the air on HF before getting back to this. I may have to let the Yagi sit behind part of the roof in order to avoid having to guy the mast. I did discover that there is a thrust bearing made to work for the rotator I'm going to get that will allow for better support of taller loads above the rotator. Using the thrust bearing will allow me to run the main mast from the ground parallel to the rotator mast for some length, taking the lateral load off of the rotator and transferring it to the main mast and house.

Once I get the rotator up I'll have a better setup to run a full wave loop in the future. In the meantime I may have to supplement the random wire with a dipole if I'm not getting the performance from the random wire that I desire.

First post, new QTH plans

My station shut down a little after 0200 May 7th UTC (2100 May 6th CDT) so that it could be dismantled and moved to the new QTH. I'm currently planning where to put antennas and how to get the coax at to them at the new QTH. I was using a MFJ window feed through panel to bring the coax and station ground in the shack (spare bedroom) at the old QTH. This will not work at the new QTH... The shack in the new QTH is the only room in the house that has a crank open window, making the MFJ panel unusable. I guess I'm going to have to do something permanent with a proper utility box outside and a custom made coax panel and electrical box on the inside. This is for the best as I was going to do a permanent solution at some point in the future anyways.

The VHF Yagi and VHF/UHF ground plane are going up on a rotator now at the new QTH. At the old QTH the Yagi was permanently pointed at the NOARC repeater in Crestview (W4AAZ 147.360) that is used for the nightly area VHF traffic net. Having the Yagi on a rotator should let me hit repeaters in Fort Walton Beach, Niceville, Crestview, and Panama City and maybe even Milton, Pensacola, and parts of Southern Alabama. I also have to figure out how I'm going to feed, route, and suspend an 80 meter full wave loop that I am going to use for HF.

I'm going to take this week and the next to gather materials and plan everything and I hope to get on the air again by May 25/26.