Hi

I have a 43 foot vertical for use about 3 metres from sea water.  My mobile antenna works brilliantly well by the sea, lots of DX is worked, but I want to try the 43 footer.  What do you recommend as radials (being as I'm so close to sea water?)  I don't practically see me putting out dozens, but guess that some should be present.  The location also has a hand rail/barrier which is about 1 mile long, I will also ground the antenna to this.  Any thought on radials?

BTW Match will be done by autotuner at the antenna base.

regards

Garry

Hi,  a question more for the Europeans on here.

Does anyone know where is the best spot to drill a hole from the engine compartment through the firewall into the vehicle interior?  I was quoted £192 !! €223 / $298 for this by my local dealership.  I want to feed  a 50 amp cable through to wire up my TS480.

thanks

G

Forget horizontal. A vertical over salt water is as good as you can get..  It will work amazingly well..

Forget the hamsticks.  If you can fit one, get a full size 5/8 wave CB type vertical, it will blow your mind...

Garry

Further thought.

a 1/4 wave on 80m is about a 1/2 wave on 40.  Could I get away with a single wire for the 2 bands?  If so, how should I match?

thanks

Garry

Hi.

I currently have a 1/4 wave vertical on 40m (basically a wire running up the side of a 10m fibre glass pole.)  It works great and I can break DX pileups wth it.  My intention is to transfer this antenna to an 18m pole, so that I can also add an 80m 1/4 antenna sharing the same ground system.

I don't want to have 2 separate antennas and wish to consolidate them into this single pole.

I was thinking of putting the 80m wire on one side of the pole to the top and the 40m on the other side to just over half way up.

Would this work?  Would there be interaction issues? I intend to feed them separately with a balun and then co-ax.

Assuming there may be interaction, how far should  I run the parallel away from the 80m wire as I could put some separators (altho prefer not to)

My goal is to keep this simple and as low cost as possible.  I don't have a junk box of variable capacitors etc, and if I don't need to make some sort of tuned circuit, I prefer not to.

This is intended as a DX antenna for 40 / 80.

Advice welcome.

thanks

Garry

F5VDM / K5XGB

Apologies.

Let me recap.

Amp works ok on all bands except 12 (power lower than expected - but works) and 10 (carrier at 300 watts when in SSB - doesnt seem to work)

thanks

Garry

Thanks for the replies.

What amp do you have Garry? Is it the AL811, or the AL811H?  How old is it?

AL811H

Its an oldish one, I bought it 'second user' from the US

Did this problem start when anything else changed?

Yes, I changed my 10m antenna, but it IS a resonant, 5/8 wave vertical

When something appears to not be working, it is best to not use it.

I am NOT using it on 10m, but it works fine on the other bands

What is the entire setup? Where do you have the tuning and loading set?

FT 920 - 1/4 wave vert for 40m works fine.  Multiband dipole for 20 - 10 inc WARC, works fine and low swr on all bands.

5/8 vertical low swr, works fine.

Amp fine on all bands, except 12/ 10m.  I notice that there is a lower carrier on 12m but it tunes and work on 12m, its on 10 that it is not working at all.

Radio is fine, no issues.  Not using ALC.  However - Plate Load settings on all bands seem to be way off the settings in the manual.

The amp puts out fine power on 80/40/20/17/15, 12 is very very touchy, but seems to work (only abt 300 watts though) and 10 not at all..

thanks

Garry

Seems to make sense, I'll check it out tomorrow.  Thanks

Garry

HI

I have an Ameritron 811A which is working okay on 40m, 20m and 15m.  When I tune it to 10m however, I notice that even in SSB mode, when I key up, there is a carrier which is at the 300w output level, i.e. a carrier without voice input. Also I cannot tune the amp to more than this power level.  The tubes are new btw.

I am under the impression that the amp is not working on this band as although I have tried to make 10m contacts, no-one seems to hear me.

It does work on 12 metres btw, although I can only get a max of about 300 watts out.

any ideas?

thanks

Garry

Thanks to all who responded.  The problem is fixed. In fact it was 2 things.  I had a look at the switch yesterday and found that ti was not quite touching the 20m connector, pushing it down with a small screwdriver helped.

Also the connector wire to the coil had actually desoldered.  Fixed and now all works.

regards

Garry

HI

I bought a used 811 which seems in reasonable condition.  It works just fine on 17meters putting out around 500 watts.  I am unable to get the thing to work at all on any of the other bands, it will tune up on 15 to about 200w but when I move the LOAD and PLATE capacitors on the other bands (20m for example), nothing happens.  I am on the correct band switch.  Its like there is no capacitive effect at all.

Any ideas?

thanks.

Garry