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I should look into building my own choke baluns. Thank goodness there are kits easily available to teach me the basics! :D
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There is also this link https://w6nbc.com/articles/2020-TBDcoaxchokebalun.pdf
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Kind of wild that you can build a balun out of copper pipe. :P
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Continuing from here…
I put up a dipole this time, and while I did receive marginally more stuff than before (only in the 2m and 70cm bands), there was also a lot of noise. The length of each leg of the dipole was calculated like this, with the velocity factors estimated for the copper wire and insulation.
(299792458 / 52_000_000 * 0.95 * 0.95) / 4I did get the copper pipe for making a sleeve balun. Would that further improve things? :3c
Well, I tried building my own ¼-wavelength monopole with the metal railing and everything it's attached to as the ground plane, but it didn't work very well. :(I'm targeting 6-meter with this, but I thought it'd make sense to use the middle of the band (52 MHz) as the target, so I did
(C / 5200000000) / 4to get the length of 1.44 meters.What did I do wrong? :( #HamRadio #AmateurRadio
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Well, I tried building my own ¼-wavelength monopole with the metal railing and everything it's attached to as the ground plane, but it didn't work very well. :(
I'm targeting 6-meter with this, but I thought it'd make sense to use the middle of the band (52 MHz) as the target, so I did (C / 5200000000) / 4 to get the length of 1.44 meters.
What did I do wrong? :( #HamRadio #AmateurRadio
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I did try a G5rv shortened to the appropriate length for the shorter bands, but didn't have much luck.
Would something as simple as this be good?
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Well worth a go.
Don't go overboard on the insulators, nylon fishing line is fine for either end, and any old lump of plastic in the middle.
Solder the connections.
A sleeve balun may help get a better match for transmit. (1/4 wavelength * 0.66 velocity factor of braid along the antenna end of the coax, connected to the coax shield that distance from the antenna)
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Still not having much luck here. I shortened the dipole to try to cover the 2m band and did get more stuff coming in, but it was all noise. :(
I can't realistically make the ladder line fully vertical due to space constraints. Maybe I just need to build a monopole instead? The balcony railing might make a good ground plane.
Or do folks think an external antenna tuner would be worthwhile here?
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Normally people don't need tuners on VHF, antennas are small enough and mono-band that you can just get it dialed in. More noise probably indicates the antenna is matched for the frequency.
I have a feeling you'd have better luck if you could get the antenna above the roof. I live in a condo, so all my VHF is done from SOTA peaks.
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Mounted a G5rv antenna around 15cm below the stucco ceiling on my balcony, but wasn't really able to receive anything, even on the shorter bands. (It's about 3.5 meters end to end when mounted, the dipole is horizontal, and the feed line is vertical.) :(
Probably will try a couple of tripods to bring it down a bit since I'm guessing the stucco (which typically is put on a metal mesh) is causing issues.
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The class war is always the poor versus smarter people
Gas the poor
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