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Amateur Radio Antenna?s for British Garden?s

The British standard garden as we all well know is often too small to erect an efficient all band antenna. In any case an all band antenna would also bring disadvantages this style of antenna is a massive compromise. At the present time of writing the most popular commercial Wire multi-band Amateur HF antenna is more than likely to be one of the following

The Carolina Windom family of antennas are:

CW 160, 265 feet long bands 160m -10m includes the WARC bands.

CW 80, 133 feet long bands 80m-10m includes the WARC bands.

CW 40, 133 feet long bands 40m-10m includes the WARC bands

CW 20, 34 feet long bands 20m, 15m, 10m

The G5RV

G5RV Full size 31 m top section bands 80-40-20-15-10m

G5RV Half size 15.5m top section bands 40-20-15-10m

By adding the G5RV coils the half size G5RV this antenna will cover 80m by extending the total antenna length by 5m.

The popular third option might be one of the families of HF trap dipoles. The Baker and Williamson trap dipole for example are:

BWD 1.8 - 30 MHz length 90 feet

WD 330 Broadband HF dipole antenna 2 - 30 MHz length 82 feet

WA 103 Broadband HF antenna 7 covers 1.8 - 30 MHz length 27.8 feet.

Any of the above commercial made multi-band amateur radio antennas in their sales write up all appear to give excellent results. From personal experience for the first two years as a licensed radio amateur my commercial antenna of choice was the half size G5RV with the added inductors for 80m. Of course in time I did begin to wonder could I improve upon the antenna and if so what one.

Asking around I was offered an interesting mixture of antenna designs the Carolina Windom antenna was mentioned and so was the doublet antenna. The disadvantage to both antenna styles was the simple fact that they are multi - band antennas the only advantage to the doublet antenna is that its home made and would be cheaper than a Carolina Windom. However on closer inspection of the two designs on paper at least the Carolina Windom series of antennas would out perform the doublet by offering a better design and higher gain.

In the end I came to the conclusion that I should make an antenna that would fit into the maxim length of my garden this proved to be a half wave dipole antenna for 40m and from this I decided to make a nest of dipoles for 40m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m. I used a Diamond BU-50. 1:1 balun this helps to reduce feed line radiation and radiation pattern distortion. This is an excellent antenna and from the amateur radio operating aspect I was working the DX. However this has the draw back that it is very visible.

This solved one problem but left me with no antenna for 80m or 160m. I came across a design for a liner loaded full size G5RV. I saw no reason why I could not construct an 80m liner loaded dipole antenna. I put up outside my garden along the river bank at weekends as an Inverted 80m liner dipole using a blank fishing pole as a mast. ?Bring the coax feeder back to the shack. This antenna has been in use for over a year I found it easy to construct reliable to use and gives excellent results both on receive and transmit with the added advantage that it will tune 1:1 with the automatic atu in the Kenwood TS-570DGE transceiver. 

My main interest is data modes especially RTTY and BPSK31 over the past year the trend has been for European radio amateurs who use data mode?s on HF to use as their antenna of choice a vertical antenna. I too have also followed this trend and since December 2005 the nest of dipoles have been replaced with a Hustler 6-BTV vertical antenna for 80m - 10m. Fortunately the automatic atu in the TS-570DGE has no problems tuning the vertical antenna and over all I have been pleased with the over all performance of the hustler with qso?s in the log from many country?s including DX stations.

During SSB contest weekends with the help of my son Peter M3PHP we erect a HF mono-bander wire two element beam this antenna came from Sandpiper it?s not to heavy and has a good front to back ratio and offers a reasonable amount of gain under the beam we mount a CW-80 Caroline Windom antenna. I brought this antenna at the WACRAL 2005 conference for a pound at the Saturday afternoon silly price auction. The antenna had belonged to Harry G3SBV and during the sale he said that it was an excellent antenna and he had replaced it with a new one.

The antennas that we currently use for 2m is a 5 element cross over yagi beam offering about 8 dbs of gain and a 13 element yagi beam for 70cms with about 10dbs of gain this is a large improvement on the popular white sick collinear antenna we were using for 2m and 70cms.

page added 23rd May 2006