Monday, January 30, 2023

Who needs a dedicated 160m antenna anyway?

  Neighbour station PA4O Peter was active in the CQWW 160m CW contest from Luxemburg last weekend. Of course Peter asked a few times if I was able to work him there.  I told him that I would do my best. Normally my dedicated 160m band sloper antenna is down for summer. After my yearly tree cutting session I install it again. So, that's what I did last weekend. But unfortunately the sloper didn't work as advertized. Probabely a loose or interrupted wire up in the tower. And of course it was raining, no option to do maintenance on any antennasystem. The only option that was left is trying to use one of my antennas for 160m anyway. I tried the inverted-V doublet in the past but knew it was very ineffective on transmit. The multiband halo could be tuned to 1:1,5 but I immidiatly noticed it did not receive as well as the..... 10m band LFA antenna. The 10m LFA could be tuned very well actually and receive on 160m was pretty good. A quick search on the internet on how this is possible didn't give me any results. Am I the first one trying this? Everyone will tell that this is impossible and the system probabely has so much loss that working stations is very difficult anyway. But I can tell you that I worked with 100W CW about 50 stations with S&P. I even made it to VO1AC in Canada. And of course I was 599 at LX/PA4O in Luxemburg. Who needs a dedicated 160m antenna anyway?


Well, just kidding of course ;-)

4 comments:

VE9KK said...

Well a 10m antenna on 160m I would NEVER thought of that! From the map it did amazing and the icing on the cake was to get into the east coast!
73,
Mike
VE9KK

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello Mike, so far I'm unable to find anyone else trying this. I was amazed I could actually hear Canada and even more amazed when he came back already on my first call. I noticed a lot of stations have very good ears on 160m. The stations without good ears are mostly from Italy. I've heard a few from Italy with good signals but was unable to reach most of them. 73, Bas

MadDogMcQ said...

I didn’t even know what an LFA was until I just googled it, lol. It sure did work out well for you though!

I’ve only managed to get contacts on 160M using FT8. All (fifteen) of them through my 40-10M EFHW. Hoping to get a 160M SSB one day :-)

73, Tom, M7MCQ.


PE4BAS, Bas said...

I've been on 160m SSB and remember at first tring with just a vertical (80m-10m) it didn't work at all. After I installed a sloper with capacitive head at the end (my garden was too short at that time) I managed to make contacts. Good luck trying, 73, Bas