Hello all!
I’m trying to get my foot in the door with HF digital and looking for antenna suggestions using FT8/JS8Call with a Xiegu G90.
I have ~60 ft if space in the backyard to work with & live on the second story looking down into the yard (~20ft up).
I’d ideally like something portable I can pack up and take around with me camping. I’m leaning towards a random length wire right now, but would love to hear what you come up with!
Thanks in advance!
that’s regular dipole, just slightly bent in middle. it’s more efficient as EFHW transformer is not a bottleneck in terms of power
on a specific length you can make it work on fundamental and odd harmonics (realistically only 40-15 and 30-10 combinations) as a linked dipole. for work on other bands you’d need to reconfigure your antenna (bring it down, connect something, bring it up again)
alternatively, consider OCFD, which gets you benefits of both (4:1 transformer as used with OCFD with the same toroid size won’t limit you as badly as with EFHW) https://www.qsl.net/kk4obi/OCF Harmonics.html depending on where you feed it, you might need to skip one band (40, 20, 15 or 40, 20, 10, but there’s a way to make it work with 40, 20, 15 and 10)
both antennas are good choice for portable operation
other option is fan dipole, that is 40m, 20m and 10m connected in parallel. this is bespoke, definitely not portable antenna, but it gives you 40m, 20m, 15m (3rd harmonic of 40m) and 10m out of the box