Saturday, December 3, 2011

160 Meter (Skywire) Antenna


After listening to several people who had loops, I decided that I had to have one. I got it up about a year ago and it has been a wonderful antenna, so good that I took down my modified G5RV.

A short description: it is 536 feet long and is about 25 feet high.It has five sides and one of the corners is attached to my tower. The feedline from it to the house is 450 ohm ladderline, which is very similar to the old television flat wire we used when I was a kid. It runs through a 4:1 balun which is mounted just outside the window and then uses coax to connect to the tuner.

There is only one problem with this antenna: it is very difficult to tune on 160 meters. It works great on 80, 40, and 20 but the band it is designed to work best on is a flop! I'm not smart enough to figure out what is going on but I'm gonna start changing parts till it gets better. This is also the way I work on cars, by the way.

Here is a copy of the antenna performance from 0.5 to 8.0 mHz. You can see that there are "lobes" at about 3.8, 5.5, and 7.2mHz, but none in the 1.8 to 2.0mHz range (160 meters). I gotta learn more about antenna design and performance.

No comments:

Post a Comment