Often I receive emails from people asking for the dimensions of the HF2V elements because they want to build one themselves. Well, here are the dimensions for all the coils and capacitors. Good luck with your experiments!
30m
New Strategy for HF2V Tuning
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.
Tuning the 30m Coil
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.
Butternut HF2V for the 160-30 meter bands
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.