Agreed on all points, Jerry ! Definitely pushes the tuner to
its limits. I never work top band with high power... I cannot imagine
how little power is actually radiating outward when I work 160 on
my big stick !
I think antenna vendors should admit these big sticks don't work on 160
- and only marginally well on 80 meters, and then ONLY WITH A LOT OF
HELP - like a big tuner, PLUS loading up the feed line as
DX-Engineering suggests, adding at least 50 feet of wire off the top,
a substantial matching unit at the bottom, and THE BIGGEST COAX you
can afford, and especially with a lot of luck. I tested mine with
RG-8x, RG-8U, and LMR-400-DB. It made a huge difference, and I
figure it would work even better with HARD LINE !
I think the fact they work on 160 is purely a bonus. Using low power,
it does get me into a couple of fairly local rag chew nets with some
guys I do some contesting with, and that is enough for me. Our bunch
uses a huge tower for 160 meter contesting and THAT works much better.
======================== James - K8JHR ======================
On 8/15/2010 10:02 PM, Dr. Gerald N. Johnson wrote:
Fundamentally the 43 foot
vertical is way too short for 160 and needs a BIG loading coil
containing about 77 feet of wire, and forcing that to be done in the
tuner will tend to smoke the tuner. There are other solutions, but the
long coax or the series loading coil at the pole base should be the
simplest solutions.
Its tuner abuse.
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