Off-Centre Fed Dipole (OCFD) for 80, 40, 20, 10

Been experimenting with simple wire antennas and I've just built an Off Centre Fed dipole (OCFD) as described here It looks like this:

I don't have 27m of free space so that leg goes up to a tree and then hangs down in an inverted L arrangement. (The co-ax if standard 50 ohm).

Using an MFJ-269 I've plotted the SWR against frequency as follows:



The dips in SWR are at:

• 3.6Mhz = 1.4


• 6.9Mhz = 1.3


• 14.5Mhz = 1.2


• 17.75Mhz = 1.6


• 28.3Mhz = 1.6

So 80m is spot on, 40 is slightly low, 20m is a bit high, and 10m is good. Note that I made the measurements close to the balun rather than at the end of a long co-ax run.

Interesting antenna that gets just a tiny mention in the ARRL antenna handbook but no detailed information.

I'll report back after some on-air tests. So far I'm hearing stations in New Zealand and North America very well, noise is also up but it's very hard to tell as conditions vary wildly from night to night.

Just had a contact on 20m with Eric BV4VR in Taiwan so I'm certainly getting out ok.

gnuplot notes

The graph was drawn with this gnuplot script:

set terminal png size 410, 320
set title "Off Centre Fed Dipole"
set output "OCFD.png"
set xlabel "Frequency MHz (log)"
set ylabel "SWR"
set xrange [2.7 : 32]
set log x
plot "swrMX4.txt" using 1:2 title 'SWR' with linespoints

The XRF-4 balun seems good, it looks like this:

It's well constructed with a different style of wire termination to what I've seen before (squash the wire between washers), it will be interesting to see how it degrades in the weather - I think I prefer the circular lug style connections. I would welcome an anchor point on the top to hang the balun.

Old Balun

I've just received a commercial 4:1 balun, the XRF-4, and so the plot above is updated with that. Below is the original plot I posted, it's interesting that this plot is rather different from my home brew balun on a ferrite rod.

The wire is perhaps 3cm shorter than before but otherwise the only change is the balun.

The dips in SWR are at:

• 3.1Mhz


• 7.12Mhz


• 14.18Mhz


• 28.16Mhz but pretty weak

Conclusion

The Off Centre Fed Dipole seems like a very versatile antenna for covering several bands, don't forget that you need a 4:1 balun.

After living with it for a couple of days I've reverted back to my old arrangement of a 40/80 trap dipole with a 20m dipole connected to the same balun.

For me, the OCF dipole is significantly noisier than the standard dipoles particularly on 80m probably due to the fact that it's much longer and had to hang down to within a metre of the ground, compared to my normal dipole which is about 10m up at one end.

It's been a very interesting experiment though.