2021-01-27, 20:35:51 (This post was last modified: 2021-01-28, 13:58:56 by Tom VA3TS.)
VA3TS Tom Shallow Lake NCS
KO4DXQ Bob Tennessee
VA3KOT John Owen Sound
VE3FP Adam Elmwood
VE3DGY Doug Owen Sound
VE3RQY Greg Owen Sound
VE3RWY Rob Owen Sound
VE3GIO Larry Woodstock
VE3WI Dave Port Elgin
VA3EZN Jim Aurora
VE3BQM Bernie
Good net Tom. Very pleasantly surprised by propagation last night - I was able to hear local hams on 80m, & be heard! Last few nets I've heard no one in OS at all. Frustrating when stations all over NA and even a few in Europe are booming in.
In despair, I was thinking of trying a different antenna, maybe a sloper aimed at OS for a little more gain in that direction. I attached a design for a short loaded 80m dipole that I could hang off my mast. Maybe after FD...
Dave, I use a short-loaded end-fed half-wave wire (electrically a half-wave but physically only about 75ft long). I feed it at one end through a 49:1 transformer. The coil is inserted at the quarter-wave point (~67 feet) so that the other "quarter wave" comprises the coil and a few feet of wire. It has a high-Q which makes it a little difficult to tune so I have a short tail (about 6 inches) of wire at the far end that I can adjust for best SWR. I get around 1.8:1 on the CW portion of 20m, 40m and 80m and can use it with the tuner bypassed. The SWR rises to over 3:1 on 3.783 MHz but the tuner takes care of that very easily.
I would expect groundwave propagation from Port Elgin to Owen Sound; it's only a distance of about 35-40km. Solar conditions would then be unimportant. A NVIS antenna would work if groundwave fails for any reason. Regular skywave propagation would put Owen Sound into your skip zone. Are you using a vertical antenna? A vertical would launch your signal way overhead of OS.
My present HF antenna is an inverted-V about 122' long with apex at 32'. Coax from rig goes to an ICOM AH-4 auto tuner at the mast base, then a 1:1 current balun, a dual spark gap lightning arrestor, then 450Ω window line up the mast. The tuner integrates nicely with the IC-7300 & matches pretty well. I've made contacts on all the HF bands with it.
I think I'll try the short loaded dipole as a sloper (I have the coils). I can hang one end from the mast and anchor the other end to a ground stake. I can point it at OS & it should give me a little ground wave gain (at least that's what people write). If it has reasonable SWR, I can run separate coax into the shack & just switch to it for the net if needed.
