This afternoon I felt the need for some air, so what better thing to do than get out in the garden and do some antennas', I like to experiment and build my own antenna's, I have been using a homebrew fan dipole with some good success, I really like the idea of balanced multi-band antennas, my next project is likely to be a cobbwebb type design, anyway for now ebay brought me for Christmas a pre-built ZS6BKW antenna.
This antenna is about 91' long with 40' of 450 ohm twin feeder, which you then attach your 50 ohm coax, the design is a computer modelled variation on the G5RV, and it gives a nice matching impedance on 5 HF bands, 40,20,17,12 and 10m, mine also tunes on 15m (it shouldn't, but does work) and also the 6m band.
With some internal ATU help it tunes on 80m, I have managed a psk contact into France, and have been reported around the UK.
On 15m earlier today (the designs non-resonant band) I managed a psk contact into east coast USA, so this band appears to be a bonus, not sure why it works though !
Interestingly I put some psk calls out on 14070, and was reported all over Northern Europe, with only one report into East coast USA, on my fan dipole it was normally all USA and no Europe.
Here is a link on what I think is a little known and so far interesting antenna.
Hello Paul, I had a G5RV for a while and was not really impressed. I guess it will be the same for the ZS6BKW. I think that installation possebilities and the surroundings are very important to these designs. For some they will work very good for others not. I'm glad you got some nice results with it. 73, Bas
ReplyDeleteHi Bas, I have the antenna around 30' above ground, and so far it seems to be an improvement over the fan-dipole, so we'll see !
ReplyDelete73 Paul.