Wind, wind, wind

December was a very windy month. Most antennas did held, however the fibreglass pole of the 20m vertical broke. We contacted the supplier (DX-Wire, Germany) and luckely spare tubes were available for a few euro’s. So we ordered a replacement…

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Perfect weather to erect all antennas

November starts with 2 weeks of mild weather, with lots of sunshine and no rain. This means that the corn field is rather dry now and easy to walk on. In the first weekend I put lots of tonkin poles…

First preparations for the PACC 2012

We had some nice weather in the last weekend of October, so I went into the corn field to do some long walks: setting up the new beverages (length: 80m each) and the HEDZ. We bought some new, higher poles…

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Squalo antenna for 6m

Introduction Adri PA0RDA, a friend of me, is trying to do some DX on 6m for a while now. His antenna position is very poor: he lives in the bottom flat of a 5-floor building. He has a balcony on…

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Contest after heavy winds

The first weekend of February was really windy. The rough wind ruined the just finished HEDZ, and nearly nocked down the other antennas. And there was nothing I could do, since I was suffering from influenza. I recovered during the…

Finalizing the antennas

Thanks to a interesting article about the so called Half Extended Double Zepp (HEDZ) by W5DXP we managed to get our EDZ working om both 80m and 160m. The antenna is working fine now on 80m. I couldn’t test in…

Optimizing the EDZ

In 2009 we built an extended double zepp (EDZ) for 80m, which also performed really nice on 160m. Although the antenna performed well in the past contests, it was always a big trouble to match it. After lots of experiments…

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Goodbye corn, hello antenna’s!

Thanks to a local farmer we are allowed to use the corn field during the winter season. So during autumn it’s always a nice moment when the corn is being harvested. First we get some view to the east again,…

Preparing the antennas

To prepare for the 2011 PACC, we did quite some work on our antennas. During the fielddays of our local radio club we focussed on the extended double zepp, which was hard to tune. so we played arround with the…

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Arrow antenna

Introduction The arrow antenna is a popular antenna for using FM transponders on satellites. These satellites have a uplink on the 2m band, and a downlink on 70cm. You can operate those satellites with a simple dualband handheld radio.

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TNC-X

Introduction The Dutch Amateur Radio Emergency Service (DARES) is currently setting up a messaging system for emergency communications. Email is sent over radio using the good old AX.25 protocol. Part of this project is the TNC-X, a simple packet radio…

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HEDZ antenna for 80 and 160m

Introduction The zeppelin antenna (or simply “zepp”) is a popular end-fed wire antenna for shortwave bands and has lots of simularities with the J-pole antenna. It consists of a long wire (half wave length), connected to one of the wires…

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40m Vertical

Introduction During the PACC contest in 2009 we missed a good performing antenna for 40m. So during the preparation for this contest in 2010 I built a dedicated vertical for 40m.

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DK7ZB yagi for 144MHz

Introduction After the somewhat disapointing results of the DJ9BV antenna, I decided to try another model. This time I selected a 9 element DK7ZB for my test. I already bought some square alu bars, each 250cm tall. Since the 9…

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CW keyer for foxes and beacons

Introduction Beacons and foxes have to identify themselves. Although I could sit along all day with my morse key, transmitting my call, I wanted to have some automatic keyer. Since I recently bought a PIC development kit (Velleman K8048), I…

DJ9BV yagi for 144MHz

Introduction I just started building a new yagi antenna for 144MHz. I used to work with short yagi’s, based on DL6WU, with 6 elements. These antenna’s were about 2m long. I stacked them, tested them both vertically and vertically polarized/stacked,…

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6-Element yagi for 144 MHz

Introduction I designed this antenna in 1995. I wanted a horizontal antenna which has nice characteristics for contest usage. The side lobs are minimized, the beam width is quite large while it has a reasonable gain and front/rear ratio.