HF Antenna Construction

[Quietus]

Badger52 brought that up, there's good information being passed.

But back to the wrapping of unused wire to terminate ("cut") an antenna length: Albeham and T7L are saying that the terminating effect is not there with insulated wire, that termination occurs with bare wire wrapped back, and not so well done with insulated wire.

Since I just bought an AS-1743 for personal use and have used it once on a 15' mast on 80m as a sloping dipole with expected short-range good results, I am hoping to get more input on the termination effect that those reels have ... insulated v bare.

I was using the reels with much wire left on them for 80m, but was using a tuner, did not check SWR at the reeled-out length without the tuner, and should have.

[T7L]

TR,

Yes, Yaesu is proud of their work on that radio. It was out of stock for some time while they reportedly sourced components for it. I'm sure that helped drive up the price. For a more versitile all around radio that can still be taken outside the Ham shack (and a few hundred more dollars) The FT 897 is a pretty good RT. You get the option for up to 100W of power that you can dial down to QRP level, an internal tuner and it also can be run from internal batteries. It is bigger than the 817/857, but not substantially bigger for those of us who have humped the 70 and similar radios. HRO has them for just under a grand.

For those intersted in the 817, I would direct you to Yahoo's FT817 Group rather than re-post a lot of stats and info here. Lots of good info there.

Quietus,

I (and others here I'm sure) would be curious to see what SWR readings and signal reports you get with different configurations of your antenna. RF energy can be strange magic as I remember the instructors in the Echo course telling us that it wasn't called "antenna theory" for nothing. - tod

[radiodog]

A formula used to determine the length of a half-wave dipole is 468/F Mhz. It will be close to the right length.