开云体育

How good can a RAIN GUTTER be on HF bands?

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).

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.

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).

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.

10m should be easy, as it is both vertical and horizontal polarization.

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.

I did one run from 1.8 to 8 MHz, and the other run from? 8 to 30 MHz.

I'm excited about this new antenna.? No one can "see it".

But how well will it work?

de k3eui?? barry

??