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[TowerTalk] Voltage or Current Balun?

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Subject: [TowerTalk] Voltage or Current Balun?
From: aa4lr@arrl.net (Bill Coleman)
Date: Tue, 7 Aug 2001 16:42:49 -0400
On 8/7/01 4:12 PM, Tom Rauch at w8ji@akorn.net wrote:

>There must be some misunderstanding Bill. Current baluns are the 
>less core-critical type of balun. 

That's good to know.

>By far the most core, power, and impedance critical balun is the 
>voltage type balun. It is also the balun that virtually always offers 
>the poorest antenna balance.

Also good to know. Exactly the type of information I need.

>One problem with bead baluns is they offer a very low impedance 
>per bead, and most of that impedance is resistive. So the stack 
>tends to get hot in situations where common-mode voltage from the 
>feedpoint to the coax (across the balun core stack) is high.

Is this typical of a tribander whose feedpoint impedance is empiracally 
designed to be about 50 ohms?

>You are better off winding an air core choke out of coax unless you 
>have a space limitation, because impedance actually goes up by 
>somewhere around the square of the turns compared to a one-for-
>one impedance vs size and cost increase in a stack of beads.

Why not just wind a current-type balun using a big core and some very 
small-diameter teflon coax? You get the turns advantage of a coil, 
without the size, weight and bulk problems of a coiled coax balun?



Bill Coleman, AA4LR, PP-ASEL        Mail: aa4lr@arrl.net
Quote: "Not within a thousand years will man ever fly!"
            -- Wilbur Wright, 1901


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