After all that I’m back to the 9:1 in the attic.
What a lot of experimentation. But I guess that’s what amateur radio is about for some people – experimentation. And I guess since KE0OG says, the antenna is usually the only part of an amateur radio station that is home-brewed, an an Amateur Extra class, I should experiment.
So here’s what happened.
I wanted an antenna indoors for 2 reasons. 1 – I live in a HOA which probably has a “no visible antennas” rule but mostly for 2 – I don’t want to have to worry about the Colorado weather messing with my antenna.
So I built my first UnUn – an EARCHI 9:1 and used it with about 35 feet of 14 gauge speaker wire with an antenna tuner. It worked OK and certainly fit in my ~40 foot long attic, but I was having trouble making QSO’s – even on 100 watts.
But I don’t want to use an antenna tuner!
So my next purchase was a SuperAntenna MP1-C from Ham Radio Outlet. This thing is wonderful but now I have to go out and adjust it from 20 to 40 meters when the sun goes down. And its not an easy thing to do. I’m so anal that I have to use my NanoVNA to precisely tune it so that I don’t have to bring my ATU downstairs to operate at the kitchen table. The vertical-ness helps for local ground wave and since I’m at 5,xxx feet altitude, the ground wave seems to travel pretty far before we get into the skip zone.
So I set out trying to build a replacement antenna. I found a 49:1 that didn’t need a tuner. I built one and tried it out in my backyard and front yard. Yeah, the wire was about 65 feet but boy, it seemed to work well and definitely didn’t need a tuner on 20 and 40 meters.
I also built a 20 meter dipole with the 14 gauge speaker wire. I attracted a lot of noise and was weird to put up. I definitely liked end-fed/vertical situations.
Then I took down my original EARCHI and put up my 20 m dipole in the attic. Noise. I didn’t use a 1:1 balun/choke to try to kill the noise. I thought it was due to my attic and the wires running around the blown insulation.
Next step was taking down the EARCHI and putting up the EFHW trying to spread the wire out in a 1/2 rectangle situation. Ugh. That wasn’t good. SWRs were way off and I needed to use the tuner which I didn’t mind since any antenna in my attic will be fed through my tuner.
Signal reports on FT8 and JS8Call didn’t seem great with the EFHW the way it was so I took it down, took the 20 meter diole down and reinstalled my EARCHI with 35 feet of wire plus 50 feet of coax and 10 turns on a FT 230-43 ferrite (same one that you use to make a 49:1 with).
It seems to be working pretty well. I definitely have to use a tuner and SWRS are really weird on my NanoVNA making me think there is a bad source of noise along the coax.
A 6 foot counterpose on the EARCHI didn’t help with the SWR’s.
Oh well. I guess I’ll operate QRP with the attic antenna until I can figure out how to stealthily setup a 49:1 in the front yard and one in the back yard. Or if I can find a way to remotely tune the SuperAntenna which I think is the best antenna I have in terms of performance. But it was $300 and all my other antennas were hand-made for less than $20 each, really.
