Aaron KU6Z Blog

Ok, so I just went ahead and made it just like the Alpha Delta DX-CC, which is a 40/20/10m with trapped 80m.  It is also resonate on 15m too.  It is setup as a slightly sloped inverted-V. I installed a 10ft 1.25″ conduit as a mast on the chimney, and put a pulley on top so I can hoist up the antenna without to much trouble.

It took me about 5 tries to get all the bands tuned.

10m leg was 8’4″ from center insulator to fold back point, which tuned to  28.200Mhz @1.2 SWR

20m leg was 16’6″ from center insulator to fold back point, which tuned to 14.111Mhz @1.1 SWR

40m leg was 33’4″ from center insulator to trap, which tuned to 7.100Mhz @ 1.1 SWR

The 80m leg, from trap to end was 3′. which tuned to 3.72Mhz @ 1.0 SWR.

15m was also resonate at 20.9Mhz @1.2SWR.

80m is very narrow tuning, SWR goes up to 6 when moving +/- 100Khz, but I have a LDG Z11 Pro II tuner for the rest of the 80m band.

I added a trap to the 40-20m fan dipole, so it can get 80m.

Here is a iPhone Panorama photo of the antenna mounted 6 ft above chimney at home.

Unfortunately the 40m is too short resonate at 7.35Mhz , and I need 16″ add to it, which means a new wire.  20m is tuned at 7.150 Mhz, and 80m at 3.750mhz.

I basically made the same 40m dipole from http://www.amateurradio.bz/40m_v.html and added a 20m fan dipole to it, so I can work both bands

I built the same fed point connector described by: http://www.amateurradio.bz/feedpoint.html

I plan on using mostly digital modes, so I tuned them for 14.070Mhz and 7.076Mhz.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, I can already see better gains on 40m over the G5RV Jr..

Using the FLEX-1500, the SSB is booming in:

I am thinking of adding trap coil to the 40m wire to bring in 80m band.

I could not resist getting another SDR radio, so I went with the FLEX-1500

http://www.flex-radio.com/Products.aspx?topic=F1.5k_features

I no longer had an extra power supply, so I ran the power cable down to the PC’s power supply, to the 12volt rail, and it seems to work good.

I had to install Virtual Audio Cable and Virtual Serial Port (VSP Manager) in order to get everything working with HRD, DM780 and JT65, which is kinda annoying, but works fine.

I had a Radiowavz G5RV Lite on the roof, but the connections on the antenna had failed in 3 spots, I re-soldered and still not working right, so I went to my old G5RV Jr, which works ok.

Since this Rig only puts out 5watts, I think it time to put up a more efficient antenna for 20m and 40m, so I get my whole 5watts worth in QRP.

I ended up building a Yagi DualBand from an old TV Antenna

I was inspired by the videos at: http://amateurradio.bz/tri-band_yagi.html

Since I had a 80″ boom I decided to create my own custom measurements, I used 440Mhz and 146Mhz on a 80″ boom and got the calculations from this Yagi Calculator at:

http://www.k7mem.com/Electronic_Notebook/antennas/yagi_vhf_quick.html

It came out to be 6-elements on 2m (146Mhz) Estimated Gain = 9.165 dBd and 9-elements on 70cm (440Mhz) = 11.311 dBd.

Took me about 4 hours of labor to put together.

After getting it up on the rotator at work, I tested it with my recently purchased MFJ-269 Antenna Analyzer.

The SWR on 2m is 1.0 at 148Mhz, and between 1.1 and 1.4 SWr on the whole 440Mhz band.

There seems to be alot of crackling on some frequencies, not sure what the issue is, though the signal strength is S9++.

The Yagi beats the Log Periodic by 2-S on 148Mhz, when pointed at my house in Brea, but the Elk beats the Yagi by 3-S on 440Mhz. Maybe it’d be better to separate the 2 yagi’s onto 2 booms and use a duplexer to split the signal.

I put up the Elk Log Periodic Dualband 2m/70cm antenna up on the roof at work, and wow! I can now hit repeaters in Bakersfield, Santa Barbara, and San Diego.  I have also been able to hear SO-50 and AO-27 satellites as they passed over, still havent been able to hit ISS though.

I plan on building my own 2m/70cm Yagi from an old TV Antenna I tore apart, and I’ll keep the Elk in my portable kit.

Just picked up a Elk  Dual Band Five element log periodic antenna from HRO.  So far it’s looking like it’s working. I’m hitting some far away repeaters.  I’m going to get it setup on the  tripod and antenna rotator and see if I can track some satellites.  Maybe I can use this to get my son interested in the talking to the International Space Station.

I moved to Brea, CA in September 2011.  Since I’ve moved to the new location, I haven’t done much on the air.  I have actually down sized my gear a bunch and only have 2 radios now, FT-857D HF/VHF/UHF at home and FT-60r handheld in my truck.  I’m using a custom S9 31ft vertical Antenna for HF and Diamond X-50A for 2m/70cm.

I am now officially KU6Z (formerly AG6DI) as of Sept 16, 2011.

I wanted to get a 4 character callsign before they are even more difficult to get. Luckily I was able to use http://www.vanityhq.com/ to help me find out what callsigns were available and at what date to file.  I tried 3 times to get a new calldign, and each try costs $13.30.  The first try I just put in a list of available callsigns, and got dismissed because I had some callsigns that werent available on the day I filed.  The second try, there were 8 other people trying for the same callsign, and someone other then me randomly won the draw.  On this one, only one other person filed on the same day as me, and so I had a 50/50 chance of winning it, and I WON! Yay!

-Aaron KU6Z

I decided to add on the IF-2000 board to my FT-950 and run the output to a RF-Space SDR-IQ.  It is really nice being able to see 200Khz of the band at a time.  I use the software from SDR-Radio.com to view the band. I hope they improve the app so it better integrates with HRD.