The QRPer Board

I've decided to go back to basics and build my dream minimalist transmitter. The fancy new computer controlled rigs are great, but I have no way of servicing them if something goes wrong, and want to spend some money with our small American companies like Far Circuits, Dans Small Parts, 3rd Planet ...

Hi Andrew, Well, that antenna farm went with the sale of my old house last year, so that avenue of experimentation is a closed chapter, and now I'm a downtown apartment dweller. However... fall is just 3 months off, and I'll be ready to go camping in the N FL woods with a spool of wire, SWR meter, ...

I really like the idea of a random wire – OK, call it a quasi-random wire, to avoid the near 1/2 wavelength antenna lengths. However, a couple of years ago I did some A/B testing with a low-mounted dipole (i.e., NVIS), and the dipole won hands-down, both for the signal strength and for noise levels...

Decided to return the ATU-10 when it would not match my 28.5’ speaker wire antenna. Didn’t seem to work on any band on the TR-35. It would never match my 40m doublet on 20m. I just don’t think it is a broadband tuner like exists on the LDG and Elecraft tuners. I really liked it’s features such as t...

Thanks for the feedback, that seems to be inline with what I've read. I did review that website and go with the 29ft antenna wire that's suggested there as well as on the QRPguys site for their 9:1 unun. I haven't had any issues tuning the antenna on 10-40m. I think you might have keyed in on somet...

also, regarding chokes, here's a reference which may be useful

http://www.karinya.net/g3txq/chokes/

HTH

ooooh well... random wire :D first step, go here https://www.hamuniverse.com/randomwireantennalengths.html and pick one of the "good" lengths (green numbers list), that will at least ensure that your "random" won' t present a too high/low impedance on some bands; pick the length...

Congrats Thomas for the Canadian license, you passed the exam with flying colors

Now... just remember to change the callsign in your rigs memories and... to change it again when you'll be back to the US of A

You're welcome; what I wrote is straight from experience; in your case, a quick fix would be using a good choke after the unun and making the counterpoise longer or adding more counterpoise wires, let me know how it goes

an almost "classic" setup which I tried (several times) is the following a 34ft antenna wire, connected to a 9:1 UnUn, the feedpoint (unun) of the antenna raised to 29ft, a counterpoise made of insulated wire dropping down (for 29ft) to ground, at that point the counterpoise wire is connec...