I haven't used that "arrester" but looking at the specs I see that it's designed for an impedance range of 300 to 600 ohms. That is, a typical open wire line working at a low SWR. That is NOT the case with a "Cerbik" doublet. Your Cerbik doublet will show impedances at various points along the feeders way outside of that range on most bands - from a few ohms to thousands of ohms.
The Cerbik doublet is just a center fed wire similar to what hams have been using since the 1930's. The distinctive feature that Cerbik developed was to limit the length to prevent the formation of a vertical radiation lobe on 10 meters. There's nothing critical about that antenna at all. I've used variation most of my hamming "career" over the past half century. The Cerbik 42 foot length does exact a penalty of a couple of dB if you try to load it on 80 meters. Center fed antennas lose efficiency very fast when the overall radiator length drops below 1/4 wavelength (1/8 wavelength each side of the feed point). What the Cerbik antenna needs is a rig or good ATU capable of matching to the very wide range of impedances it will present to the transmitter. The Elecraft ATU's will do this in most cases. You may or may not use a balun. That depends upon whether you care if the feeders radiate. Sometimes the vertical radiation from an unbalanced feed line helps with DX if the antenna isn't up at least 1/2 wavelength on the band you want to use for DX contacts. I'd be very suspicious of putting anything on the feedline for "protection" that wasn't designed to deal with thousands of volts of RF (if you're running more than QRP) or the impedance extremes such an antenna will present to it. The best lightening protection is to disconnect the feeders when there are storms in the area and, if possible, have them disconnected outside of the house. That's true of any kind of feedline. Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- In a painfully slow, round-about way, I'm getting a Cebik 44' doublet put up. I'm curious if anyone is familiar with the ICE brand of lightning arrestors (http://www.arraysolutions.com/Products/ice/impulse1.html#2)? I'm familiar with PolyPhaser products, too, but the ICE equipment sounds well-built & good for the job, too. -- 73, Mike Boice, KW1ND Karns, TN _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
