>From: Pete Smith, n4zr@contesting.com
>
>Prepping for SS. What do people think about the usefulness of 40 and
>80-meter inverted vees at about 50 feet? I had them at 90 feet (apex) last
>year, and felt that the 80-meter IV was a great domestic antenna but the 40
>was a tad too high. Now I have a rotary dipole at 100 feet on 40, and I'm
>thinking of moving both IVs down to 50 feet or so. too low? Would 65 feet
>be better? Or where? I'm also putting up a parasitic array for 80 that
>models to be a killer on lower-angle stuff, so the 80 capability from the
>inverted vee would be mainly to fill the domestic gaps.
For FD and SSB SS in 1993, I used a VERY low 40m dipole with good effect.
My antennas were quite modest, with an A3 at 35 feet, and a 125 foot
doublet at 45 feet. (Oh to have even that now...)
I strung a low dipole at about 20 feet and pruned it for resonance in the
40m phone portion. It was aligned so that the ends pointed toward europe,
roughly NE. The idea was to attenuate the strong Region 1 signals and try
to pick up stations in the midwest population centers.
It worked. After SSB SS, my QSO totals on 40m were nearly double from the
previous effort. Perhaps the biggest benefit was not having to use the
tuner to switch to 40m (which involves cranking the tuner around 12-14
turns) from 75m on the doublet.
There was no computer modelling on any of this. I would gladly have put
the dipole higher, except that I had some handy support points and the
feedline I had on hand was somewhat short.
I'd put up the vees. Can't hurt to have more antenna choices.
Bill Coleman, AA4LR Mail: aa4lr@radio.org
Quote: "Not in a thousand years will man ever fly!"
-- Wilbur Wright, 1901
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