Pre-winter antennawork finished

The weather forecasted was good, but the real weather was bad today. We had rain almost the whole day again. Between the rain at some dry moments I finished the antenna task. It was only a matter of mounting a radial and connecting the antennatuner to 12VDC. What I basically did is to connect the radial via the front of the LFA and back to the tube that holds the antennas. The end was fold back a little so it would fit. You can click at the photo on the left to have a good view.
The 4 element LFA is much larger as my HB9CV, will it be so much better? I have to test it out.

The vertical does work the same as before. I always appreciated this antenna. But is it that good compared to the inverted-V? Well, I've done some tests with mixed feelings. The "one" radial construction gives it some directivity, how much?..Well 1dB or so, no shocking difference. The antenna is 7,5m long and the radial is 7,5m long as well so it is a "balanced" antenna. However the CG3000 is not a balanced tuner. It tunes well on all bands exept for 12m. I might construct a 1:4 balun to insert between the tuner and the antenna to get a easier impedance matching. Have to think about that. Hope someone can give me advice about this??
I tried it on 15m this afternoon and got surprisingly good reports from W4GHW (+4dB) and OX3HI (+12dB), which of course tells me nothing about the antenna but more about the propagation. I mentioned before, propagation is not always reciproke. Today was good for me to TX I guess and less good for RX.

Europe...

The results from the vertical are not disappointing on 40-15m till now. On 40m/30m it is certainly better as my inverted-V, on 20m, 17m and 15m I had high hopes but it is just slightly better, sometimes the inverted-V is better. I tested at daylight and most stations are from europe. I received some from the USA on 20m and they were strong (S9) but they had almost the same signal on the inverted-V. On 60m and 80m the inverted-V wins by many dBs. I didn't hear any signal on 160m so I have to test that later.

The LFA...well it has a excellent SWR over about 2MHz bandwidth, really incredible. But not much propagation on 10m today. However, monitoring for a few ours always gives some results...

And while writing this VP8LP from Falkland Islands was spotted several times.

CQ CQ...

The fun is that I had a german tourist sightseeing my antennas just after I had everything in the air again. DL1BFE Gregor from Borkum actually, we met on lightship the Borkumriff in 2013. Unfortuntately he and his wife had to get on the train to the Eemshaven to get home again with the Ferry. I just discovered Gregor is a autor of some interesting books: http://www.gregor-ulsamer.de/