You've gotten plenty of good advice, and one of the best pieces of advice was Don's suggestion to make the antenna a bit longer than the ~66 ft required for a resonant half-wave dipole on 40 meters. As Don mentioned making the antenna longer will make it easier to tune on 20 and 10 meters where a 66-ft antenna has an extremely high feedpoint impedance.
Exact length is not critical as long as the two legs of the antenna are of equal length. If you have room, you could try an end-to-end length of 87 +/- 3 ft or 105 feet +/- 5 feet. These two lengths are not magically efficient or any such thing, but a lot of us have found them easy to tune on multiple bands with simple tuners. The two lengths will look familiar to users of the W3EDP and G5RV antennas. Both lengths tune well as a center-fed doublet on non-WARC bands from 40m on up. Both can be pressed into service on 80m if need be. 73, Ken K3VV Coopersburg, PA _______________________________________________ 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
