I bought one of these antennas on eBay for $20, reasoning that it was cheap enough to take a chance, and if it works it would serve as a travel/portable/emergency HF antenna for my KX1 - and, short-term at least, as the main antenna at the house. The seller, Bell Imel Group LLC, says:This system requires NO GROUND and NO COUNTERPOISE. It only requires a minimum of one support and it can be configured for vertical polarization, horizontal polarization and NVIS operations. It tunes from 40 meters to 10 meters using an internal tuner on your rig or an external tuner.Sounds good to me.
It arrived by Priority Mail in about a week. Upon first inspection it looks like a 50 ft. length of zip cord with one of the twin-leads cut at the halfway point. It terminates in a BNC connector.
First test was to hang it from a hook off my deck, running it along the front of the house, around the corner and through the door into the shack. In this configuration the KX1 tunes it up fairly well on 20m (3.1 SWR) but SWR is pretty high (9.9) on 40m (as measured by the KXAT1, which may or may not be calibrated correctly..); I'm hoping both of these figures will improve if I get it up high and in the clear, and away from the side of the house. On receive, the antenna works quite well. And quiet - even with the plasma TV on there was less broadband noise than I typically encounter with a random wire or the Jeep-mounted verticals (Outbacker and mono-band hamsticks). So in all, it's $20 well spent.
The only question is: What exactly is it? A J-Pole ? A Zepp? Damned if I know. I can't find any similar antenna design on the web or in any antenna books in the shack. From what I can tell it doesn't seem to be cut for any particular frequency as it requires a tuner to match it to 50 ohms. But it appears to work.
Some links regarding end-fed wire antennas:
While in antenna mode I took some time to properly attach the TerraFlex mounting brackets on the Jeep, drilling through the transom and bolting them firmly to the body. While doing this I had a close look at the HF connector and found it to be pretty much shot. I originally salvaged this from a 3-magnet mount that was on my old SE-R; I guess I got my money's worth out of it, but it's time for something new - the High Sierra Sidekick is the #1 candidate to replace the Outbacker.
Until then, I bought a new 3/8-in-to-SO239 mounting stud and installed it along with a short grounding wire from the underside of the stud to one of the screws which hold the door latch thingy. Now I can tune the 40m hamstick to under 2:1 - without the ground wire the antenna was a basket case, reaching 50 ohm resistance down around 6.2 MHZ with an SWR dip a bit lower. I adjusted the whip for lowest SWR in the CW portion of the band. So now I have at least one antenna that loads up properly. The JST-245 has no problem matching it even up in the phone segment. Of course it's still about 8 ft. away from the plasma TV, so not much use until the living room is shut down for the night. Been too hot and sticky to do anything with the hamsticks for the other bands, but the Outbacker, once cleaned up, loads up nicely on all bands except for 10m. The JST-245 is getting some use now; might try some RTTY next chance I get.
With the mobile antennas out of the way, I relocated the end-fed wire antenna to the back of the house, running it out the bedroom window and along the side of the house - still not in the clear, but it works well enough for me to SWL and practice my CW at night with the KX1 before I fade. I'm still too chickenshit to actually attempt a QSO, though I'm finding myself on occasion able to copy CW without realizing that I'm copying it, a sure sign that it's starting to stick. I did some tuning during the IOTA contest this past weekend and was able to copy some of the higher-speed QSOs - but contest QSOs are relatively easy because they're predictable.
The KX1 has turned out to be a real pisser of a radio; despite crappy band conditions and RFI I've had lots of fun tuning around and getting to know all the menu-driven features to the point where I can operate the rig without the manual. I'm hearing a lot of stations in the midwest and south during my midnight tuning sessions, plus the occasional European.
(From 1978 WRTH)
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