Today I’m at home watching the kids, and I decided to try some 20m contacts. After mucking about a bit with end fed half wave antennas, and not being happy with it, I decided to make the wire as per the instructions for the L-Match tuner I built (based on Peter, VK3YE’s HF Portable youtube series), and 22m of wire appears to work much better than the 12m I did have.

I made a contact with Ron, VK3AFW portable 4, as he was doing a SOTA activation on VK4/SE105, which is a distance of 1249.8 km from home and I got a report of 5 and 7, which I hope isn’t too bad with my 5 watts output.

Yay :)

I strung the 22m wire up as an inverted V with the peak about 9m up the Chinese Elm in the back yard.

The max RF field strength is no longer on the far edge of the varicap’s range and signals are a little easier to detect. The only issue I’m having is that the power meter in the radio gets pegged at maximum even with no voice being transmitted, just a carrier. This didn’t happen with VK1GH’s tuned dipole, on that I got peaks in cadence with my voice. I got a contact, so it mustn’t be too much of an issue!

Over the next weekend I’ll turn the 12m of wire into a 20m dipole I’ll string up at home in a more permanent fashion. I’m borrowing the clubs antenna tuner so I should be able to trim that nicely.