Steve, Your tree may be an opportunity for putting up a horizontal or sloped delta loop antenna. The lowest operating frequency would depend primarily on the total length of wire you put up. A total length for a loop antenna should be close to the wavelength of your lowest frequency of operation but with a good tuner there is a lot of room to play.
A friend of mine has a sloped delta loop with one corner high up in a palm tree (about 75 feet up) and the other two corners are at roof top level stretching the 50 feet across the length of his house. I think he has about 280 feet of wire so you can see that it would be a narrow delta loop (similar in fact to one that I have). But, his performance over the years from 80 meters on up to 10 meters has been good. I also have a delta loop with one corner up a fir tree about 70 feet and the other two corners in two other fir trees about 55 feet apart from each other and each up to about 50 feet height. I couple that using a Palstar BT1500A balanced line antenna tuner -- I feed the antenna using 450 ohm window style ladder line. It is my best antenna. I also have a Traffie 5-bander Hex Beam which is also a very good antenna. 73, phil, K7PEH On Jan 5, 2010, at 10:27 AM, KC2VNI wrote: > > > Thanks for the many fine comments. I only have the 1 tall tree. It is > approximately 25-30 feet high. It is dead so there is no way I am going to > harm it (accordingly, this is not a concern). > > Here's the "take-away" I got from reading your many fine suggestions thus > far: > - Make sure you do some research on the type of antenna you want to get. (I > am an electrical engineer by background but RF engineering and antennas is > NOT my strong suit.) > > - Make sure you get some height to your antenna. I purchased the Buddi Pole > system BUT I understand that any form of antenna like this is NOT going to > give you good performance. > > - It is probably a good idea to use some of the local hams here to get some > help with the antenna system as they can help out with picking this. > > - Battery power may or may not be appropriate for continuous operations of > the equipment. > > - I am not so concerned about getting a "Ferrari" for a radio as my 1st one > (in lieu of something closer to a Chevy) as I believe that the manual is > fairly well laid out. The big concern here is context. Example: it's nice to > know HOW to perform an alignment of the radio BUT the question for the > beginner is "What does alignment actually do?". > > > > > -- > View this message in context: > http://n2.nabble.com/New-K3-User-and-New-Ham-tp4253024p4256584.html > Sent from the [K3] mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:[email protected] > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
