开云体育

I was intrigued with W3VET's idea of making a roll-up antenna out of a
chalkline. So when I spotted them on sale for $2.99 at the local hardware
store I just had to give it a try. Here's the result:



I used some 20 ga. teflon-coated wire that was tangled up in the junkbox,
and got at least 50' on the reel. If you used 22 ga., I'm sure you could
get a quarter wave on 40 meters. I mainly wanted something for receiving
but will probably try it out on transmit with a suitable counterpoise before
long. The big clamp will make it easy to fasten to most anything handy for
supporting the end and the best part is this project took about 5 minutes
start to finish ;-)

I've only had my FT-817 for a week (thanks to great service from George
Howard at GIGAPARTS!) and really appreciate the good info on this group.
But for those of us who take the digest version - would you PLEASE trim your
posts of excessive over-quoting? Thanks!

73, Bob W9RAN

I bought a plastic housing unit at Home Depot for $5 and I was able to
get about 70 feet of #26 on it. I actually could have gotten more but it
foulde up some so I went back to 70 feet and had no more reel fouling
... works slick!