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!
I think a 40m EFHW might be your best option. If you can keep the antenna up for extended time, you can make a window bulkhead with some wood or you can buy one of the fancy ones MFJ makes. Otherwise, you could just run your coax to the antenna and then tie (with parachord or similar) the ends to the tree, etc and something sturdy inside.
A more expensive solution would be to use a magloop inside. You could also get a vertical and put it in the yard and run coax to it.
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No. They can be fed wherever is convenient.
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If you don’t have trees and want an easy, portable solution. Buy a $20 20 foot “crappie” fishing pole on your favorite online retailer, and run a 20m 1/4wave vertical wire up it. Add between 4 and 8 radials on the ground, and craft up a simple guy system with some rope and tent pegs. Cheap, lightweight, and highly effective, especially at this point in the solar cycle. Cut some shorter wires for higher bands and you can pick and choose which one to hoist on a given outing. The only downside is that right now, specifically js8call activity is still heavily on 40m. You will make boatloads of ft8 contacts on 20 though.
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The trick with a friend and JS8Call would be to utilize heartbeats and script up some sort of notification alert when a path opens.
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40 meter end fed half wave
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Do you have trees? Can you run a full wave loop for 40m? (40m circuference, does not have to be of any particular shape, triangle, rectangle or what can you fit should work okayish)
Like EFHW, it gives you 10 15 20 40m, and if you load it against ground, also lower bands, perhaps also 12 and 17 with tuner (can’t do that with EFHW)
This is option for base station, for portable use EFHW is your best bet
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EFHW it is then, or magloop
or maybe linked dipole in inverted-V configuration, fed in middle. good both for mobile and base station, but no idea how much space do you have this way
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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
An EFHW can be oriented as an inverted-V, it’s just that it’s fed at the end rather than in the middle (at the top). If that’s how you set it up, the main difference is some transformer losses in the EFHW, but it can operate on all harmonics rather than just odd harmonic bands. A center fed inverted v may be a little more tolerant with regards to tuning the length. Centre-fed is going to be more “idiot proof” in that respect and possibly easier as a first antenna.
