Living in a dense suburban area, I've been very frustrated with the amount of local noise on 60 and 90 meters in particular, even with a pennant antenna. After reading about several alternatives and trying a couple, I finally put up a horizontal pennant. Results are very good: just now I'm enjoying good audio from Radio Nacional de Angola on 4949.73 (pop music to 0100, then time pips and news about the death of Fidel Castro). Haven't gotten much usable audio from them for several years! Earlier, I had decent audio from what I presume to be Beibu Bay Radio on 5050, with China-style time pips at TOH; never heard usable audio from them on 60M before.
The pennant and flag antennas were designed as verticals to be used by amateur operators on 160M. According to those who know better than I do, there is very little horizontally polarized signal on 160M, so the antenna was designed to be vertical, even though that meant it would pick up more local noise, which is mostly vertically polarized. But from about 90M on up in frequency, these same folks say there is plenty of horizontally polarized signal available. My horizontal pennant is only about 15 feet off the ground, same height as the feed point of my vertical pennant. I use a DX Engineering pre-amp located at the antenna, and protect the coax feedline at both ends with 31-material chokes. With that set-up, the noise at the receiver reads about 1/2 S-unit, down from about 3 S-units. Next step is to reorient my northwest-facing pennant to horizontal polarization. So if your local noise is bad enough, and you have the necessary trees, try a horizontal pennant. Glad to answer any questions for anyone who wants to try this. Regards, Art Delibert KB3FJO North Bethesda, MD _ Hard-Core-DX mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/dsl.html
