Today the rain kept away! There was still a biting wind, but a few layers kept that at bay while I searched for a space in my back garden to erect a 66ft long wire. It's ended up running diagonally across the garden from a chimney at the front of my bungalow, to a 20ft scaffold pole which I erected in the opposite corner of the garden.
The wife was not pleased and I don't think my neighbours will be either! The reason most people chose their houses around here is the fabulous view of Winter Hill and Rivington Pike, so having a big scaffold pole appear on the horizon (not to mention a Diamond X300), is not something to look forward to as far as they're concerned. But when you look around at everything else surrounding our homes like tall street-lamps and telegraph poles with spider's webs emenating from them, my scaffold pole doesn't look that bad.
Once it was erected and connected to my external antenna switch, I had a quick play on the 7610 in FT8 mode. Using my 10W, I checked out PSK Reporter and saw that the furthest stations which heard my CQ's were a couple of operators in Brazil and BOTH stations contacted me and ended up in the log. Happy days!
10,000km on 10W
After playing FT8, I followed the advice of Jason from Bolton Wireless Club and ran WSPR to see on a map far my 10W was reaching - and I was impressed! The first report showed a contact in Argentina! I was very pleased.
And then.........
After just one day of playing with this new antenna, I had managed to make contacts on the East & West coasts of America, all over Europe, Russia, Costa Rica, Japan, Australia and even the Antarctica on 10W!!!
I only had a very brief stab at SSB on 40M and got two German operators. I'll do more SSB later. At this point, I've only tried 40, 30 and 20M (which all tuned very quickly on the rig's internal ATU), so I'm going to have to try out the other bands. I'm guessing the MFJ-993B will match the long wire to 80M and who knows - maybe the topband? We'll see.
SPECIFICATION:
- 64:1 unun
- NO TUNER needed
- NO counterpoise needed
- Frequency coverage:07.00-30MHz
- Resonant on 40/30/20/17/15/12/10m
- Wire length ~ 66 feet 20.12 meters
- Power Handling: 300 watts
- Stainless Steel hardware
- Stealth 1.5 mm black wire
- Connector: SO-239
2 comments:
Tom I have a similar set up. How have you found the long wire compared to the G5RV >
Hi (Unknown), The long wire has WAY outperformed the G5RV. I thought it was going to be real noisy, but it's about 3db quieter and as can be seen on FT8 and WSPR, it's got me MUCH further than the G5RV (Half-Size). Having said that, the long wire is in a MUCH superior location.
Thanks for visiting.
73, Tom, M7MCQ.
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