Now it’s towards the end of June and I have been listening to the other club members I chat and contest with reporting on all the times 50MHz has been wide open on sporadic E, I decided today I would knock up a simple antenna for 50MHz for the garden. My location is not suitable for any real antennas due to neighbour issues so I thought I would make a wire delta beam and mount it fairly low as I have a suitable 2m length of plastic pipe I could use for the cross boom. A quick look at the design scuppered those plans as I had no suitable 75ohm coax here.
I then considered a simple aluminium dipole as I have loads of 1.5m lengths of 12mm tube in the garage. Then it came to me in a eureka moment. A good old trusty inverted vee would be easy to make and do the job nicely!
Since I made my first 20m inverted vee dipole I have since butchered it by cutting off the coax to use elsewhere and it has been lying around the garden for a year or so in the grass in the corner of the garden. Rescue that and put new coax on and I am good to go!
Next (as seen already above) I needed a pole. I took the bottom 3 sections from my 8m SOTA fishing pole which gives me about 3m of lightweight but stiff pole. In the garden there was fitted a rotary washing line with a two part stem set in the ground. Amazingly it was the perfect fit for the bottom section of the pole! The two sprung plungers even stopping it flapping around:
Into the HF antennas odds and sods box and I got out one of the SOTAbeams lasered guy rings I bought to hang the dipole from. I slid it down to a reasonably but not excessively snug point and wrapped some tape around below that to stop drifting lower and possibly cracking as the plastic is fairly brittle feeling. I also sealed the feed point with liquid insulation tape which is great stuff and taped the coax down the pole to take the weight of the coax, which is longer than I need and only RG223 but I am just looking for something to get on the air and do some tests:
With my HF dipoles I usually peg the other end to the ground with a length of string to insulate and keep the voltage maximum point off the ground but that really didn’t seem a plan. So that delta beam boom was called into play as a dipole spreader:
It’s literally just lashed on with insulation tape:
At each end I drilled a single hole to thread the wire through which actually retained the wire quite well due to the tension and angle. But I backed that up with the ubiquitous cable tie. Also visible is a blob of the liquid insulation tape on the end of the wire to stop water seeping up the wire via capillary action:
Here is the finished set up ready for tuning. On the left of the image you can see the coax running into my custom wall mount coax connector box:
Talking of tuning…
To ‘design’ the dipole I use done of my favourite sites I use for all my HF dipoles over at sotamaps.org. (Click on the 2nd tab for the calculator). I put in the centre height measurement from my set up and adjusted the end support height to get a little under a metre horizontal distance between mast and end support. You can set the wire type via the settings button. You can see it offers me 1.32m for each side. So I cut mine to 1.42m to start as it’s always easier to trim than add!!
First measurement showed beautiful resonance a little under 50MHz, so I trimmed 10mm off each end. Nearly at 50MHz, so 10mm more. Resonant now more in the CW end so I took off another 5mm. The final cut length is actually 75mm longer than the designer suggested, so it could be my selection of wire should have been for a thinner one or thicker insulation than I chose. (that’s ex red wire with a dose of UV fading applied!):
SWR 1:1, zero reactive component and 49ohms resistive component (50 ohms a tad higher up the band but still in SSB section). I’ll take that!
Plugged into the trusty Yaesu FT-857D and a quick scan showed some Es stations calling. Found an EA station and called him, replied to me first time! As did the next 4 stations. Nice one!
So there you go. It is dead easy to get on 6m even with very awkward neighbours and small gardens. 50MHz truly is the magic band when those Es open up too!