Antenna installation
New antenna installation phase 1
At the restart of my hamradio activities I only had one antenna for HF (and which still have) was a Diamond WD-33S, which is a T2FD type: Tilted Terminated Folded Dipole, developed in the 1940s, but still a very good broadband antenna for 2 Mhz tot 28.6 Mhz without additional tuning needed. It is suspended to a telescopic Geroh KMR6 mast (6 meter of height) which I obtained from an arm dump and on which I added an extra aluminium tube of about 1.5 meter. The other end was first attachted to the mast of the X300N at a heigth of appoximately 9 meters above ground level. At the right side of the picture below you also see the Diamond D-777, which is a receive-only antenna, mainly used for monitoring the airband traffic, that is situated at 108-136 MHz for civial aviation and 230-400 MHz for military aviation.
So this was the initial setup (click on a picture to get a larger version):
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Geroh KMR6 |
First antenna array |
New antenna installation phase 2
It is obiously clear that a wire antenna does has his restrictions regarding its directional spectrum of radiation which is mostly perpendicular to the wire itself. So in my configuration it was only useful for contacting stations in the East (mostly Asia) and West (mostly US and South-America) but had severe restrictions in the north and south direction.
This was solved by buying me a SP6CYN hexbeam and a Yeasu rotor G-1000DXC. You can find pictures of the building phases by clicking here.
After assembling and optimising the hexbeam and calibrating the rotor, it was time to get it all onto the roof. In order to be able to fix things later if needed, and to keep enoughh distance to the neighbours, I decided to mount it on the mast at the left side where initially the Diamond WD-330S and the X300N were situated. The WD-330S was temporarly moved to a fixing point on the outer wall and the D-777 will be discarded for the time being.
This gives the following setup (click on the picture to get a larger version):
(The sensor in the background belongs to my weather station and will also get a definitive place in the near future).