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G5RV vs. Ground Plane on 80M: G5RV by 5dB!

Excited by the pos­si­bil­ity of adding to my DX worked totals on 80M dur­ing the ARRL DX CW con­test a few week-ends ago, I hur­riedly installed a new 80M ground plane (GP) antenna. Like the year before, I intended a single-band effort and the new GP was going to be my secret weapon.

Con­tin­ued…

Posted in Antenna, Construction, Contesting, Model.

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Paths to Everywhere!

I have been play­ing with HFTA soft­ware from the ARRL Antenna Book to deter­mine the typ­i­cal take-off angles needed to com­mu­ni­cate to DX locales. First step was to develop my ele­va­tion pro­file, which I did based upon the instruc­tions included using a pro­gram named Micro­DEM. While not the most intu­itive thing in the world, I did man­age to fol­low the Antenna Book direc­tions to obtain my DEM GIS file from a gov­ern­ment loca­tion and to cre­ate exportable FAN files needed for HFTA. A FAN file is a ter­rain height pro­file in a par­tic­u­lar direc­tion from my QTH “tower” location.

Con­tin­ued…

Posted in Antenna, Model.

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Bands and Modes to Date

Posted in Operating.

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NCJ North America QSO Party, RTTY Feb.

Call: WF7T
 Operator(s): WF7T
 Station: WF7T

 Class: Single Op LP
 QTH: TN
Operating Time (hrs): 10
 Summary:
 Band  QSOs  Mults
 -------------------

 80:  156    50
 40:  130    46
 20:   66    23
 15:   37    13
 10:    0     0
 -------------------
 Total:  389   132  Total Score = 51,348

Con­tin­ued…

Posted in Contesting, Operating.

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Delta Loop Feed Model Comparisons

One of the hams on my twit­ter feed, Dan YO3IBW posed a ques­tion ask­ing if he should run a delta loop for 40M. Dan’s anten­nas are sit­u­ated on the top of his apart­ment build­ing in Bucharest. The base of his mast is sit­u­ated at about 30M above street level, with antenna fir­ing E/W. I decided I would model sev­eral antenna sce­nar­ios to help illus­trate Dan’s options.

Con­tin­ued…

Posted in Antenna, Model.

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