Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Articles and blogs about antennas. Both commercial off the shelf antennas as well as home made DIY experiments by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
A few months ago I started looking at various options for omnidirectional antennas with circular polarization for satellite communications. I came across the TA-1 137 MHz turnstile antenna from Wimo, which looked like an interesting option for a reasonable price.
Continue reading “On-air tests of the Wimo TA-1 turnstile antenna”
Today we got the first storm warning of this season and so I went out to secure the DX-88 with 4 guy-wires. At the same time I did a new tuning round because I have noticed that some of the bands have moved since the last adjustment. This time I have managed to get 30 meters working.
Few months ago I have decided to resurrect my 20 year old HyGain DX-88 vertical antenna again. It was a very good idea.
It has now been eight years since I have retired my Hy-Gain DX-88 antenna declaring it dead for good. I was standing with a broken base element for the second time and I decided not to spend any more time and money on it but try a new antenna, a Butternut HF2V covering 160, 80, 40 and 30 meters.
Two recordings I made during the 2011 CQ WW CW contest showing how well the Butternut HF2V receives on the 21 and 28 MHz bands. The videos were recorded using the Funcube Dongle equipped with the HF converter kit and my GNU Radio based software defined radio receiver, GQRX.
I usually check my Butternut HF2V vertical antenna every spring to see how much it has suffered during the winter. The winters in Denmark can be very windy and wet, which is not very good for an antenna. This spring I was rather busy and I postponed the annual check until now. I haven’t used the antenna for a long time, so I didn’t know what to expect. Physically, the antenna is still standing and only one of the four guy ropes needed to be repaired since the last check more than 1.5 year ago.
Sunday, April 10, 2011 we met at OZ7SAT to start working on our antennas. The weather is becoming better and we have a few plans for upgrading the antenna farm at AMSAT OZ headquarters.
I took a few photos of my Butternut HF2V vertical antenna during my winter holidays 2010/2011. You can click on the images to get higher resolution photos. Enjoy!
More than three years ago that I have mounted my Butternut HF2V multi-band vertical antenna outside and left it suffer from the windy and humid Danish climate. The settings and performance that I could achieve back then are documented in several blog posts, e.g.Tuning the Butternut HF2V.
What has happened with the Butternut HF2V since then? Well, nothing really… During these three years, the antenna has been standing and performing very well without any need for fixing or tuning it. I have done a visual inspection and tightened the guy ropes every now and then, but that’s all. In order to document it I have taken a few photos and made some SWR scans.
Continue reading “The Butternut HF2V antenna after three years”
My parents needed a new TV antenna for UHF because the old one was broken. So that’s what we did this nice and sunny Sunday. Unfortunately, we do not have a ladder that is long enough so we had to improvise with my dads bulldozer 🙂
Watch in high resolution
