Playing with Tuners and Longwires

 I am always on the look out for the ‘holy grail’ antenna. I might not ever find it but I gain a lot of experience and have a lot of fun along the way. My latest dive into the quest has taken me down the longwire route with a tuner and a chalk-line winder.

First the tuner. I was looking for a small, capable, manual QRP tuner. I finally decided on the Emtech ZM-2 and a no name Chinese Z-Match Tuner that seems to be currently flooding the internet. Morten, @LB0FI has done an initial video on this tuner with a promise of more videos to come……I look forward to them

The Antenna:

YouTube to the rescue again. I remembered seeing a video where a ham was using copper coated stainless steel trolling wire. I couldn’t find any to the length that I wanted here in NZ fishing stores but found 300 metres of it on Amazon for a reasonable price. The wire is sturdy, winds well into a Stanley chalk line reel and feeds nicely without tangles……generally.

Here are some pictures of my setup as I play and experiment with it.

IC-705ChineseTuner-1

Chinese Z-Match Tuner feeding into the IC-706

Just in experimentation I have the wire strung between two plastic electric fence wire stakes going over a SOTABeams Mini Tactical pole which puts the top of the inverted V at about 5 metres. In this configuration I am getting good NEVIS performance which is ideal for the Alpine Fault Net and also local SOTA activations. I accept that it is unlikely the plastic stakes will accompany me on SOTA activations. Just an aside, the signals seen on the waterfall in the picture above was Europe coming in over the long path at 16:45 hrs in the afternoon.

The other end of the antenna.

ChalkLineAntenna

Chalk Line Antenna - Stanley Chalkine casing and 35 meters
of copper coated stainless steel trolling wire

The beauty of the chalk-line setup with 35 metres of wire on the spool is that it allows me to vary the length of the radiating element with ease and also use this as a method of tuning if required.

Matching 80 metres with the same configuration of antenna a few days before.

ZMatchSWR80Meters

Z-Match Tuner - SWR on 80 Meters


The tuning can be a bit sharpish but most definitely workable.

Anyway, just thought I would share my experimentation's so far in that it may be of interest or use to other activators out there.

Cheers

Phil ZL3CC

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Batteries for Portable and Field Radio

Small, lightweight, capable, manual QRP tuner - Does it exist???