Since it appears that you are interested in contesting, why not replace your
WARC antenna with a 40m shorty and continue to use your C31XR. You probably
will also need a longer mast to get more separation. You can then use wire
antennas or side mount your WARC antenna for those bands. You should be
able to do this within your $1500 budget.
John KK9A
To: towertalk
From: Peter Dougherty
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2006 09:34:56 -0400
At 09:22 AM 09/12/2006, donovanf@starpower.net wrote:
>An increasingly popular single tower solution providing good
>performance on 40-20-17-15-12-10-6 is a 3 or 4 element SteppIR and a
>Cushcraft 402CD. A 30 meter dipole meets the needs of most DXers,
>or you could use the new SteppIR folded driven element.
>
>I realize this solution is a good deal different than your current
>installation, but it provides the major boost in competitiveness you
desire.
Well, yeah, that's the best solution but not even close to fitting
into the cost parameters. In retrospect, I have absolutely no doubt
that this is the route I should have taken last year when I had the
chance to put up anything I wanted - a 4el SteppIR is somewhat
comparable to my C31XR in performance specs (a little less but not
massively so), but I'd have had the space for a 2-el 40m yagi up
there for sure. Now, with a $2500 investment in aluminium less than a
year old, I'd be spending close to $2000 on just the Steppir, plus a
bigger mast, possibly a larger-capacity rotor and not to mention
paying an installer easily one if not two full days' labour rates. In
all, that would probably cost me close to $3500 when all is said and
done. Maybe if I were looking at competing seriously to win in a
major contest I'd consider spending that kind of scratch, but to gain
one extra band???
Cheers,
Peter,
W2IRT
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