Short loft antennas

At the old QTH I had a problem with 160m antennas. At one time, we were going to try a local 160m AM net. Somewhere I have some crystals. My solution was this small loft vertical that worked really well. It can easily be adapted for your situation. I was surprised how good it was.

Although my antenna was on 160m, the same idea (helical windings and a top hat) could be used on other bands like 80m, 60m, 40m, or even 630m.

See https://sites.google.com/site/g3xbmqrp3/antennas/160m_loft_ant. 

Loft trawl - lost amateur gear

It is now 22 months since I was discharged from hospital following my stroke. I have yet to get into the loft to properly explore the things I put there when we moved QTH over 2 years ago. My problem is ladders, although I am getting close to getting up there to have a good rummage around the boxes!

As I recall there were quite a few boxes with odd pieces of amateur gear, although these were mainly wires, SMPSUs and the like - nothing of value. You could well argue that if I have managed without these for over 2 years then they need a new home and certainly I don't need them. Maybe the next junk sale or rally?

160m loft antenna erected

160m loft antenna

Today I erected a small loft antenna for 160m use. The prime purpose is to allow me to test my QRP AM transceiver (that is under construction) with G6ALB in the next village. The idea came from an old RSGB book called, "Practical Antennas For Novices" by John Hayes G3BDQ. It consists of a long coil wound on a PVC pipe about 1.5m long with a couple of wires along the top of the loft as a top capacity hat. In John's design he used 21mm pipe but I chose 32mm instead and my inductance measured 590uH. Just a little more inductance in the shack was enough to make the antenna resonant when tuned against ground (my copper hot water tank and pipes in the house). Now it is time to find out how well (or not) it works. Incidentally without the additional loading in the shack it was a good match on 40m and 15m too.

UPDATE: My first 2 WSPR reports on the new (indoor) antenna were from OZ7IT at 853kms! The antenna must work, HI. Shortly after PA0A spotted me.

Antenna feeders

Today I have to move my two main antenna feeders which wind their way untidily through the house from the back of the house, where they enter the building, to my shack in a front bedroom. This means getting up into the small loft space to run the cables across and down. Some years ago I had a bent end fed antenna on 10m squeezed up there and it managed to get to South America on QRP SSB. A small ground plane for 10m (with a capacity top hat to shorten the vertical section) would probably perform quite effectively.

UPDATE: Job done. It took about 1 hour and everything is fine.