Tag antenna

Short DL6WU yagi for 23cm

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In the previous Winter I built a HB9CV-in-a-box for 23cm for my uplink to the local ATV repeater PI6ATV. Although this antenna works nicely, its gain just isn’t enough when their 23cm preamp is broken (which, unfortunately, is the case…

5/8 Wave vertical antennas for HF

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Lots of radio amateurs build their own verticals. Most of them tend to stick to vertical antennas with a 1/4 or 1/2 wave sizing. Just a happy few build a 5/8 wave vertical antenna. This is remarkable, since the 5/8…

Altoids L-tuner

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A while ago Tjeerd PA3GNZ donated me some Barkleys mint tins (identical to the famous Altoids tins), which are rather popular by QRP builders to house small homebrew stuff. Two weeks later I found a czech webshop, offering a kit…

70cm bicycle antenna

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During the summer season I sometimes travel to work by bike. It’s a 21 km trip through the countryside, passing cornfields, orchards, deer and spoonbills. The road includes dikes and bridges, and even a ferry to cross one of the…

PoRG v2

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A couple of years ago I built my first PoRG (abbreviation for “Power over RG-cable”), a simple phantom power supply to power some device over antenna cable (e.g. a preamp, active antenna, coax switch, etc). I recently built an active antenna…

A very small active antenna

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Small active antennas like the “mini-whip” (by PA0RDT) are very popular at the moment. They provide good reception of signals from HF all the way down to the VLF band. Here in the Netherlands Van Dijken Elektronica sells a nice…

The “PoRG”

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The “PoRG” is a very simple but useful device in your ham shack. “PoRG” is an abbreviation for “Power over RG-cable” and allows you to put DC on your antenna cable. Some people call it a phantom power supply. With…

HB9CV-in-a-box antenna for 23cm

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The HB9CV has been a popular antenna for decades, especially on the 2m band where it is commonly used for direction finding (foxhunt). Others create arrays of HB9CV antennas for DXing. Since I needed a simple antenna for 23cm (to…

All antennas up again

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All antennas are in place already for the 2014 PACC contest. Meanwhile they allow me to work HF bands during the Winter season. Last year the field was in such a bad shape, that we were not able to setup…

First antennas placed

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This year Adrian PA0RDA and I hope to be back in the PACC contest. Our main goal is always to improve our own score, combined with having lots of fun on the bands and test our homebrewn antennas. This will…

J-pole antennas for HF bands

Introduction I’ve been using J-pole antennas on the 2m band from the first day I got licensed. They perform very well, are easy to construct and are cheap. Since Adrian PA0RDA and I have been experimenting with vertical antennas for…

20m vertical repaired

The replacement tube for the 20m vertical arrived. I immediately fixed the fibreglass pole and erected the antenna again. It’s working great again. I also moved the guys to the top of the third element (instead of the second element),…

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…

Squalo antenna for 6m

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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…

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…

Arrow antenna

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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.

HEDZ antenna for 80 and 160m

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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…

40m Vertical

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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.

DK7ZB yagi for 144MHz

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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…

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,…

6-Element yagi for 144 MHz

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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.