I have had this antenna sitting under the work bench in the garage for some time. My initial plans were to use it on 15m by making it a little longer and going to town to get it close to a 50 ohm match and hope like hell it worked ok.
So, being the bottom of the cycle and not much doing on 15m at all and that i can tune the 40m dipole up on 15m and it will work ok, and 10m is pretty much a bust, I figured i would turn this thing into a 1/4 wave on 20m.
After a bunch of false starts and I want to smash this with an axe moments 🙂 I got to doing what was needed to make it kind of work. First part was to bypass the tuning coil as it is not needed, its about 5.2m long, a bit on the long side i know, but without going at it with a hacksaw it was not not becoming shorter LOL.
Put it on the vna and it looks kind of ugly. But We can fix that I hope.
A couple of radials later and its starting to look more like what it should. 2:1 swr across the whole 20m band. When i can be bothered to add another 2 radials that should come down even more.
Fired up FT8 and it seems to be working as good as the dipole. I dont think its any better, but it is certainly not worse. That gives me 20m at home now in a more permanent way until I can be bothered to buy a tri bander.
