Amateur radio, space, technology and other geeky stuff by Alexandru Csete
Articles and blogs about the Butternut HF2V vertical antenna, written by Alexandru Csete OZ9AEC.
I have a lots of pictures of the HF2V in my picture gallery.
Now that my HF2V was tuned rather well, it was time to test it on the air.
I started out on 30 meters where I worked SVØXAO right away. He gave me 589 and I gave him 599. Despite the good reports there was a lots of QRN on the band. This didn’t stop me and the HF2V to work VO1TK who was using an IC-735 and a dipole. Not bad.
Later on I worked many more contacts, including TU2 and VP5 on 40, and OY3 and CN2 on 80. The HF2V is doing very well!
Tuning the 80 meter coil of the HF2V messed up my settings on 40 and 30 meters in a way that I ended up with barely acceptable SWR on all 3 bands. I definitely needed a new tuning strategy.
Now it’s time to adjust the 80 meter coil. The current setting for all three bands are given below
With the current settings on 30m (26cm 2.5 turns shorted), fc on 40 shifted to 7.188 MHz – even with 8 turns shorted. Moving the shorting strap to 7 turns, fc shifts to 6.988 MHz. With 7.5 turns shorted fc = 7.039 MHz.
I have tried to adjust the 30m coil on the HF2V in order to bring the resonance closer to 10.1 MHz. Increasing the length of the coild 17->20 cm did indeed move the cenntre frequency to 9.2 MHz, but going up to 25 cm did not seem to make a big difference; it only moved fc by about 250 kHz.
After my DX-88 died in a winter storm, I have decided to give the Butternut HF2V a try. This antenna is a 10 meter long vertical for 80 and 40, with extensions available for the 160 and 30 meter bands. I was rather curious about it since this is the only vertical antenna that provides the four lower bands in one package. Moreover, having used the HF6V previously, I had quite high expectations to this one. Although rather expensive, my success with antenna have been very satisfactory so far. As a bonus it even works well on 15 meter band with flat 1.2 SWR between 20-22 MHz.
Continue reading “Butternut HF2V for the 160-30 meter bands”
I am now back again in Høm for a few days and this time I wanted to mount the HF2V permanently.
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 have now received all the parts for the HF2V with 160m and 30m extensions, and I took a few days off in order to erect it during a long weekend.