Operating a ham antenna on a smaller lot is pretty frustrating, to say the least. Well, in one of his latest videos, G3OJV decided to reveal installing a fully functional HF antenna in a backyard that cannot be called large in the first place. So his system has a center of a 49:1 unun. For those of you who do not know just yet – unun is similar to balun. Yet, in case of the balun, it goes to unbalanced antenna from balanced line but the unun’s both sides are unbalanced to begin with. You should go url to learn much more about it.
The good thing about it is the fact that the small box will only cost you as much as $50 but in return will cover the entire HF band (up to 200 W). You can check out some of the videos available on the net to check out the inside of such a box. Needless to say, the box is basically a toroid and it has a couple of turns of wire in it – no biggie.
The ham antenna is basically an end-fed dipole fed that has an unun. This one gets people divided – some of them claim that this is an incredible solution while others cannot imagine working with it in the first place. There’s plenty of reason to believe that such a gizmo will never do better than an antenna system but there’s also the fact that you can have tons of fun using just about any type of radiator.
While the thing is about 33 ft long, you can easily bend it in in order to make it perfect for the lot you have. Although it doesn’t really sound all that efficient, it’s still something. Such an antenna will be easy to erect since it will only require a few insulators as well as a string or a supporting rope. Besides, you can easily hide is just about anywhere using a low-profile rope and a thin wire.
The main question here is – will it work? Well, you won’t know for sure until you try it yourself. There are even weirder and less obvious options out there. There are tons of other radio hacks that you can use as well. One must not dismiss one option or the other – who knows, perhaps such an installation will be the perfect fir for you.
