WIRE ANTENNAS UK

END-FED LONG WIRE

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.

Anyway, it's up now and it's staying up. The WireAntennas.co.uk  EFHW is really intended for portable use, but I think it's too heavy for that, and so that's why I'm using it as a base-antenna. During the installation, I removed the black winder and sealed the resulting holes with silicone. I also put sealant all around the case edges and even around all the connectors and mountings, internally and externally. It should be 100% waterproof!

The good thing about this new wire is that it's at a different orientation (NE to SW) to the G5RV's (N to S), which will hopefully bring in some new contacts. 

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.........

10169  MILES on 10W

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