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*How good can a RAIN GUTTER be on HF bands?*
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*Since moving to a "retirement community" last year I have been searching for a reasonably good HF antenna.*
*I have tried a few 10-20 ft verticals (not well hidden) and a 140 ft long wire end-fed wire (which everyone can see).*
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*So how about a commercial aluminum (painted) rain gutter.*
*I feed it with 50 ft RG8X?? into a? Palomar Engineering? 9:1? UNUN? with two counterpoises: 15 ft and 30 ft.*
*I have a wide-range tuner in the shack, so now SWR issues.
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*Well, it is "hidden" and it does tune up? on 160m, 40m, 30m, 17m, and 10 meters with SWR? < 2.5:1*
*but that may mean it is just "lossy" (the UNUN).*
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*I'll give it a try this weekend with Fldigi, running no more than 25 watts on CW, PSK, and Olivia/Thor modes.*
*I'm really curious about 160m at night - I have never operated on that band.*
*Are there "watering holes" (freq) where different sound card modes hang out?*
*Seems like everything is FT8 these days.
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*10m should be easy, as it is both vertical and horizontal polarization.
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*Here are ? Nano VNA??? SWR?? and ? RETURN LOSS graphs.*
*I plot RETURN LOSS as a negative number to have the same shape as the SWR curve.
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*I did one run from 1.8 to 8 MHz, and the other run from? 8 to 30 MHz.
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*I'm excited about this new antenna.? No one can "see it".*
*But how well will it work?
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*de k3eui?? barry*
Barry K3EUI
