Sunday, July 08, 2007

Antenna hoist installed

It's great to be back home after a few weeks away. Apart from cleaning up the pool (which had gone green), doing my washing, and trying to sync up with local time, I've been trying as always to improve my HF antennas.

Hanging an 80m dipole on a suburban house is no easy task, my goal is an inverted V from the tree at the front of the house to the tree at the back of the block with the feed point above the roof of the (two story) house. 

Shown here is a vertical pole with a pulley at the top that raises up the balun feed point. This arrangement is still not idea, it doesn't clear the peak of the roof and those palm trees you can see in the image are a real problem on our block - they invariably grow and catch on wires I string up.

Just before I went away, "Experimental Methods in RF Design" by Wes Hayward and others, arrived. What a fantastic book! For anyone interested in designing and building RF projects, this is a must get book, clearly it has influenced many other designers.

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