VHF FUN

...invest in the antennas, not the gear, and you'll double your fun for less $$

Steve Katz, WB2WIK/6

Background

I've been operating the VHF bands since the mid-1960's. I was first “hooked” by using a Gonset Communicator-II on two meter AM, and have been hooked ever since.

In the early days, I was so gung-ho about VHF that I thought it would be very nice to just have a Technician class license and stay with that forever, since I was making 30-40-50 contacts a day on two meter AM, and then later six meter AM, running low power and either very old or very homebrewed equipment. I was 13 years old, and there was no end to the number of local hams active on VHF in the New York metropolitan area where I lived.

Early into my ham career I found it frustrating that the two meter band was evidently capable of all sorts of DX that I couldn't hear or work. I had a neighbor, Neal, W2KME, who lived about two miles from me in a location no better than my own, and he sat there rag chewing with hams 300 miles away on two meter AM (!), and most of the time I thought he was talking to himself, since I couldn't hear who he was working. I chatted him up on the air, told him I was a neighbor and a kid and I'd love to see his station (to see for myself what he was up to). He invited me over, and I rode my bike to get there.

Bike ride

Two blocks from Neal's house I saw his “secret.” It was a 45 foot tall tower, with a 15 element Telrex two meter beam up another fifteen feet atop it. That beam cast a giant shadow, since it was 28 feet long. Looking more closely, I could also see it was connected to a fat water hose. Maybe he water cooled the beam because it got so hot? Remember, I was 13 or 14 years old, here...

Neal invited me inside to see his station, which, other than a National HRO-60 receiver, was entirely homebrewed. Oh, the HRO-60 and a D-104 microphone. Other than those, his entire station was homebrewed. And I mean everything. Every transmitter, VFO, modulator, amplifier, and VHF receiving converter was homebrewed - dozens of items, all neatly arranged on desktops or in rack cabinets. His two meter rig was a plate-modulated pair of Eimac 4CX300As using push-pull 4-250 modulators, and ran about 600 Watts output power, on two meter AM. His receiving converter was a “W2AZL” converter using a low-noise planar triode tube preamplifier, and he downconverted to 28-30 MHz, using the HRO-60 as a tuner. Incredible stuff.

With this amazing accumulation of stuff, Neal could chit-chat with stations in Maine and Virginia on two meter AM, like they were next door - stuff I couldn't even hear. So, I asked the big question: “What's the most important thing, here, that makes it so you can contact stations so far away?”

He gave me the honest and correct answer, which I'll never forget: “It's the antenna, son. Nothing else is very important, and I just had fun building all this stuff. But if you brought your little Gonset over here and connected it to my antenna, you could work everything I can.”

So, a few weeks later, I did.

We plugged the top-mounted SO-239 connector on the Gooney Box (familiar term of endearance for Gonset Communicators of the 1950's) into his water hose - I mean, feedline. It turns out what I thought was a fat water hose was actually Neal's coax, and it was military RG17/U, which looks like very fat water hose, even close up. It has about one-fourth the loss of conventional RG213/U type coax, and is, of course, about four times fatter and heavier.

I tuned across the band, that Monday night. Sure enough, there were stations in Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine - and one in Montreal, a VE2 calling CQ on two meter AM. Montreal was not only another country, but was more than 350 miles away, almost due north, over several substantial sets of hills. But there he was. With my mighty 5W output from the Gonset, I answered the VE2. And got him!

Next step

“Dad,” I said, “I want to put up a really big beam antenna. I've saved up the money for it, but I think I need help.”

The 15 element Telrex was, at the time, $99.95 from Telrex of Asbury Park, NJ. It was the highest gain two meter antenna on the market, ever, and had this 28-foot boom which would overhang our house. I had the $99.95, and also the money for a rotator, coax, and rotor cable, since I'd been saving birthday money, Christmas money, paper route money and any kind of money for a long time. I was hoping to somehow strap this monster to our chimney, and get Dad to go along with it.

Dad was, if anything, a pretty good carpenter and backyard mechanic and had a tool collection that anyone would envy. He reviewed my plans and decided I was crazy. The chimney would never hold this thing. It would take something far stronger, like an antenna tower. I didn't have enough money for a tower, and the base, and the concrete, so we struck a compromise: A roof tower, which Dad would install to be sure it's done right - and I'd do everything else.

Not so many kids are so lucky to have parents who would let them install a tower on the roof of their new suburban home, but I was.

A few weeks later, I had a 15-element Telrex yagi for 2 meters towering over the neighborhood at about forty feet above ground. The little Gonset exploded to life with signals it had never heard before. Neal came by in his car, looked up, and said to me, “Good job. You've got it, now.”

VHFing

He didn't know how much I really got it. The big antenna opened not only doors, but windows and corridors, and I found myself working stuff that, other than Neal, almost nobody else locally could work. I got a part-time job after school and on Saturdays, working at - where else? - the local “candy store,” a large retail electronics store that happened to be the biggest ham radio equipment dealer in the tri-state area. I worked in the ham radio department. Minimum wage, but lots of hours, and I started accumulating equipment.

One thing led to another, but without doubt, I knew that by far the most important things were antennas. The gear almost didn't matter. I had a little 4 element six meter beam, not on the roof tower, but on a tripod over the garage (too low, and too small) and although it “worked great” -- as hams often say when they make lots of contacts -- in reality, it didn't work great - it worked. A co-worker named John, WA2PBN (who is still active today as W5JON in Texas), had a 6-element Telrex six meter beam up about fifty feet on a tower in his parents' yard, and could work circles around me on six. If I wanted to really “DX” on six, it was better to do it from John's house. Proving once again, antennas aren't the main thing, they're the only thing. Just as Neal said.

That, and Location

When I bought my first house at the ripe old age of 23, having just gotten married (don't even go there) and my first real job out of college, VHF Wisdom prevailed and I looked only at homes on hilltops with a clear horizon and long view. The house sat at 1230 feet above sea level, 300 feet directly above a 10 mile long lake, so it had an “over the water” shot in several directions. Although the house was more than 40 miles from New York City, I could see the Skyline out several windows. It was high, for New Jersey.

Up went the same roof tower, this time with antennas for 50-144-220-432 MHz all fed with hardline. When I first fired up on the air, almost every station contacted said something like, “Holy cow! You're in New Jersey?” And they said that because they rarely heard anyone from my state quite so strong, before. Especially a lot of guys up around Toronto, 350 miles to my northwest. Most of NJ is blocked in that direction, but I wasn't. It was “across the lake,” and I could see about halfway there, it seemed. Signals from Toronto were so strong on VHF that I could actually watch Toronto UHF-TV stations, using an indoor loop antenna on the back of the TV set. From 350 miles away.

So, antennas count, and location counts, too. I've since moved more than a dozen times, and owned fifteen more homes, and every single one of them has been hand picked as a ham radio location, at least to the extent that I made sure there were no antenna restrictions, and I also made sure I had a clear horizon in some key directions.

Simple math

Here's a common theme among hams who have dabbled in VHF but became disheartened or bored, and went on to other things:

“Where's all the SSB activity on two meters?”

Ya know, it's right there, but you're not hearing it. And that's the truth, almost always. The fact is, the VHF-UHF bands are nearly noise free and you really can enjoy a receiver with 0.1uV sensitivity. Because the bands are so relatively noiseless (compared with HF-MF), antenna reciprocity works very well up here. That is, antennas that work well for transmitting work equally well for receiving - which isn't always the case on HF.

Here's a factoid that many don't quite understand: No matter where you live, or what you use for a station, if you're working VHF-SSB, the vast majority of signals you work and hear will be weak. If you have a terrible location and poor antenna, you might only hear five weak signals all week long - and they'll be weak, for sure. If you move to a mountaintop with a huge antenna array, now you'll hear one thousand weak signals during that same week - and they'll be weak, too. The nature of VHF-UHF weak signal work is that the signals really are weak. With a good antenna and good location, you'll hear a lot more of them, and the closer ones will be stronger, for sure - but the majority of signals will still be weak. They'll just be coming in from farther away.

Another factoid: Every time you double your working radius, you quadruple your working area, and the quantity of stations you can work. If you increase your working radius (on two meters) from 50 miles to 250 miles by adding a new beam and tower, you've just increased your working area, and the number of stations you can work, by a factor of 25 to 1. Not five to one, but 25 to one, because the ratio is the square of the radius change. The average ham probably doesn't think about this, but VHFers should: It's a very important statistic.

So, when you work VHF using a little zero-gain loop on the chimney and have a nice, solid 50 mile radius coverage for day-to-day tropo work, you may think you're doing just fine. But change the loop to a 9 element beam, and increase its height to double what it was, and your radius will change from 50 miles to 250 miles, in most cases. That will immediately allow you to hear, and to work, 25 times more stations than you could before. Geometry is a powerful thing.

If you routinely hear five different stations on 2m SSB in an average week, now you'll be hearing 125 different stations in that same average week. Don't believe it? Hah! Try it. Then, you'll believe it.

Bottom line: On average, a small rotatable beam at fifty feet above ground will increase the number of stations you can hear and work by a factor of about 25 to 1, compared with a loop antenna at twenty-five feet. A large rotatable array will increase it by 50 to 1.

With a 50 mile working radius, you're covering 7,854 square miles. With a 350 mile working radius (large beam array on a tower), you're covering 384,845 square miles.

That's important stuff.

So, next time you wonder, “Where is everybody?” think about improving your antenna situation. A small change (in terms of actual cost) will make more of a difference than a monumental change in the station equipment.

And always remember, the nature of VHF weak signal work is that we're dealing mostly with weak signals. You can have the biggest station on Earth, and most of the stations you'll contact will still be weak - there will just be a great number of them.

Alternatives

Not everybody can put beams on towers. If you absolutely cannot, due to restrictive covenants, consider taking your whole VHF station portable for routine operations. This can involve making the station small but effective, and easy to get into and out of your vehicle - or maybe leaving it all in the vehicle!

Another childhood memory: As a kid, even with the big Telrex beam and having worked up to about 100 Watts of transmitter power on two meters, and a very good receiving converter ahead of my trusty NC-303 receiver, I still didn't have a good location. We lived in a lowland area only about 100 feet above sea level, very open to the east and south but blocked in some other directions. Even the huge 15 element beam on the roof tower couldn't see over a 450 foot hill just to the north of me, which restricted what could be worked in that direction.

So, even before I had a driver's license, I built a mobile setup and used to beg dear old Dad to take me “up the hill” to see what I could work from up there. The top of the hill was only about 3 miles away, and it was a short drive. We'd set up with a 20 Watt Clegg transceiver and a homebrewed, portable 8 element yagi that I could break down into three sections and stuff in the trunk in about 30 seconds. The yagi was supported by a 15' collapsible mast which was in turn supported by something similar to a Christmas tree stand. I could set it all up in a few minutes, next to the car so I could reach out the window to turn the antenna.

From the top of “the hill,” I could rag chew with guys 300 miles away, in the directions I was blocked from home. This teaches one a lot about “location,” which of course drove every single house purchase I ever made, as retold earlier.

So, you might consider something like this, too. It's great, especially if you have a fairly local hilltop you can access conveniently. It also great if you have a really great mountaintop you can access inconveniently, but use just now and then for a VHF contest or something.

Another alternative, of course, is to make friends with a local VHF “Big Gun” (a ham with a huge and effective home station) and make arrangements to use his station now and then. Like I started out doing with Neal, W2KME - and like hundreds of hams all over the world do, to enhance their operations on all bands, not just VHF.

End

There you have it.

I don't want to argue with anybody about whether they're “doing great” or “having fun,” because only the operator himself knows if he's having fun or not, and it's not up to us to judge. Some might have a whale of a good time fooling around on two meter SSB, making one contact a day (or night) out to 100 miles or so. Great.

But most people have a competitive spirit and want to do better. I'm surely one of those. The point here is to understand that unless you already have several large stacked beams up very high above ground, you can improve your VHF station a great deal - regardless of what's in the “shack.” And the improvements can come in quantum leaps, not little baby steps. As we detailed earlier, a loop at 25' will make contacts. From the same location, usually, a beam at 50' won't only make more contacts, but will make twenty-five times more contacts, simply because you've now exposed yourself to twenty-five times more area. Silly to argue the point, it's too easy to prove.

WB2WIK/6