I went out on another POTA adventure to round out my goal of 500 contacts a month. This time I trekked out to Prince River Wildlife Management Area in Barre, Massachusetts. The antenna this time was a 53 foot inverted-L design I modified from an idea I found on YouTube.
A commercially-available antenna from Chameleon is a 25 foot telescoping whip that connects to a variety of other stuff they sell for the portable ham radio market. I don’t have any of the Chameleon parts ($$$), but I have a spool of wire($). To an electron, a 25 foot piece of wire looks pretty much like a 25 foot telescoping whip…
The design I ripped off used a 28 foot piece of wire and an alligator clip to extend the whip to 53 feet. I just cut a 53 foot section of wire and put a support loop at 25 feet. The 25 foot section is vertical, and the remaining 53 feet goes out more-or-less horizontally. A number of radials and a 4:1 unun round out the setup. In Barre I was using 15 radials which worked pretty well. The 53 foot length is essentially one of those carefully-selected “random” lengths that, with the 4:1 unun, tunes on multiple bands. I’ve had this antenna “tune” on all bands 6-80, and the contacts were made this day on 10, 15, 20, and 40 meters.
At the site are remains of what must have been a sizeable house. The fireplace is large – I estimate (poorly) that it’s ten or twelve feet on a side, and the hearth looked to be about six feet wide and half that as wide. The foundation was 25 feet or so a side.
One can see that the coverage of the antenna was reasonably good. There were additional contacts in Germany and Spain that didn’t show up in the screenshot.
More information about my POTA operations and antenna “experiments” will be coming up in future editions of the Signal.
73,
John KK1X