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The VHF/UHF antennas above have served me well in many contests, emergency drills and casual QSOs.

Their radials are intended to help focus RF upward towards the birds, but I've not found any need to remove the radials for earthbound work. The little 'beaters put out a fine omnidirectional horizontally polarized groundwave signal, from Silicon Valley to the Sierra foothills.

I purchased two on closeout intending to stack them for gain, but so far have been happy with the performance of just one. Click here if you need the Halo 6 Assembly Instructions.

The Diamond is rated for 200 watts and handles signals from my 160 watt amplifier just fine. (And, I keep the power down to the minimum necessary 5 watts or less on local repeaters, boys and girls.)

My homebrew "flagpole" vertical, shown above, performs really well for what it is. See "An AH-4, PVC and wire: a Great Flagpole Antenna!" for construction and performance details.

The SD-40 dipole is oriented North-South. It of course out-does any vertical on forty meters when used as intended. It hangs at about 35 feet, for regional rag-chewing (Southern California to Oregon) and local Silicon Valley net omnidirectionality. Although it often hears DX like Japan better than the vertical, on most DX hops beginning at Washington State I need to switch to the vertical. DX requires more height for a lower takeoff angle. See AA3RL's helpful EZNEC analysis of this.

The additional ten meter dipole wire hasn't been tested much due to the sunspot low, but it is useful to have both vertical and horizontal antennas available for the local "Charlie 10 @ 9 Net", Wednesdays at 9PM on 28.350 Mhz.

I've always thought that adding a big top-hat to the HF vertical would really improve low-band performance. Also I may attempt to hang a higher dipole. If I succeed at any of the above, I'll post it here. In the meantime, thanks for visiting and feel free to look around.

Other pages:
Antenna Tower Project: MA-40 Rotatable Crank-up
Antenna Farm 2: The Flat Roof Challenge
Flagpole Antenna Project • Antenna Farm 1
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