I had a business trip to Medellín, Columbia. It could be my #61 DXCC country worked from. Unfortunately Columbia is not in an IARP agreement that allows for no extra licence operation in many countries in South America. I emailed Nelson HK4Y asking for advice on the application. He pointed Read more
A few options exist for 40m beams, e.g., see 40m beams at JK Antennas. Full size beams cover the whole band but they are heavy, about 70kg for 2 el and 150kg for 4 el. Beams shortened with coils are half weight but their bandwidth is also about one half. Read more
SWR of antennas on my new tower were too good because of high coax losses.The coax cables were as follow: 25′ jumper of RG213 on top 100′ of LMR600 to the bottom of the tower 120′ of LMR240 to a switch on the next tower 150′ of LMR240 to the Read more
I bought the TW-32-XL beam (2 el on 30, 17 and 12m) from Mosely to gain directivity on 30m. I am not operating on 30m much and beverages provide a receive directivity, but it would be nice to have a strong signal in case a rare DX comes up. For Read more
Once the GXP antennas were up, there was time to test the SWR curves. 20 and 10m were fine but in all antennas the resonance on 15m was too high, with SWR at 21.00 MHz > 2:1. The 15m element was too short and needed to be extended by Read more
A good contest station needs Yagis in fixed directions so that a multiplier can be worked right away. I bought two GXP 11-3 to be put on a 36m tower, just below GXP 17-4. One was to be put at 17m fixed to SE (Caribbeans and South America) and another Read more
My 4 sq did pretty well in the ARRL DX contest and also in CQ 160 SSB. But it was noisy. Perhaps because the elements were not tuned, with resonances from 1.78 to 1.84 MHz I decided to tune the elements to around 1.83. The impedances were: 42 Ohms for Read more
My 160m transmit signal with the shunt tower was OK but not great. In contests, I heard many DX stations well but could not work them until the conditions were better. Definitely I was in the middle of the crowd. Still miracles occurred. In 2025 CQ WW 160, special conditions Read more
The installer lifted the GXP 17-4 antenna to 110 ft and could not get it any higher. He arranged for a younger installer, who was waiting for good weather on a weekend. All while the 40m element was grinding in the wind. After a few weeks waiting I wondered if Read more
I decided to add an extra 120′ (36m) tower to have a better signal in contesting. My signal from the current 100′ (30m) tower is not competitive on 20m and 40m so I decided to upgrade a 2 el 40m beam to 3 elements and 3 el 20m beam to Read more