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.