The weather got milder today. It was foggy, very little wind and about 4C. I simply couldn’t resist making one more attempt on erecting the HF2V.
I left it the day before yesterday in three pieces, which I quickly re-assembled, and mounted into the parasol foot I have been previously using for the DX-88.
Because the antenna is very light-weight it is really flexible and it bends quite a lot. Moreover, it is very tall (almost 10m), thus quite impossible to make it perfectly vertical all the way up without proper guying.
For now I had only the 40m and 80m coils mounted – I felt that should be enough for the one day I have left. I have set the coils as instructed by the manual and hit the ham bands surprisingly well. Best SWR on 80m was around 3.65 MHz, while on 40m it was 6.8 MHz. I didn’t play with the coils, since the tuner of my IC-765 would take care of matching is inside 7.0 – 7.1 MHz. I was, however, surprised about that lowest SWR on 40 was not as good as on 80. I think this is where playing with the loading coil comes into the picture, but I didn’t bother. Maybe I should also mention that I used only 4 radials out of the 12 the were supplied with the ground radial kit.
The antenna did quite well. I did work SP, OK, DL, 9A, and 4X on 40m. Some signals were coming out! I will post some pictures later.