QRP Station > Antennas

a 34ft doublet, ladder line, a balun & remote tuner

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G0BVZ:
Better safe than sorry, Don. I'm with you 100% on RF exposure: 20 years ago I went QRT when my son was born because I was reluctant to expose him to any sort of rf. Now he's at uni and I'm back on he air!  Wasn't much hard info back then so I went with safety first.

Your project should be a winner so be sure to tell us how it works out!!  ;D

KO7I:
I thought I would post some follow-up experiences of my doublet experiment. For me it has been a winner in ways I never imagined. Each element is 17ft long. It is fed with 100ft of commercial 300ohm window line. I did find that switching to a 1:1 balun and then a 4 ft length of RG-213 coax to the auto tuner has worked out best. The 4:1 balun created tuning challenges on 20M.
This past winter I had the honor of getting to be a host station for W1AW/7 (WA) on 30 & 17 meters. I was able to log just shy of 1,000 qso's for 10 hrs of operations.
I used a 1/4 wave vertical tuned to resonance on 30M (with 60 radials). On 30M I ran 100W out - the pile up was that crazy.
On 30M (& 40M too) I found that I had high local QRN levels on the vertical - s6 to s7. On a whim I "auto-tuned" the doublet to 30M. The 30M received signals were down 1 s unit, but the QRN levels dropped to s2 to s3. This made working the weaker callers so much easier. The chatter on the DX node while was operating on 30M the guys were reporting that they thought I had a beam. This because I would forget to switch back to the vertical for transmit at times.  ;D
On 17M I ran with my KX3 and the doublet during the W1AW/7 op, I did run split freq ops to maintain control of the pile-up. The doublet performed very well and I was quit pleased.
This past winter DX season, I found myself drawn to 17M the most. I did get several of the DX-expeditions into the log using the KX3 and the doublet. I had difficulty with 10M and the MFJ tuner not wanting to load that band. No biggie, most of the time when 10M was open, I was at work anyways. So no worries.
Sorry for not doing a technical review, sometimes it is nice to share a "hamming it up" message. This summer I will putting up a 52ft tower with a 20 - 6M 2 element 6 band quad. The doublet will not be taken down - I like it that much!
73 es vy gud dx, Don KO7i

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