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| Reviews Summary for Butternut HF9V |
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write your own review of the Butternut HF9V.
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KQ6XA
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Rating: 5/5
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Jul 9, 2008 11:14
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Good ALE Antenna
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I just wrote an article about assembling and putting up the Butternut HF9V vertical antenna on my roof.
My specific application is all-band HF Automatic Link Establishment (ALE), and the HF9V fulfills this function quite well. I am currently using it literally in 24/7 continuous service. We had 40MPH winds and heavy rains within a few days after I put it up... there have been no mechanical problems and frequency shift of the SWR curve during the downpour was very slight.
The informal article includes some close-up photos of the antenna being assembled, SWR plots generated by a network analyzer during initial tune-up, views of the feedpoint, full antenna, and resonators. It may be of interest to just about any ham considering use of this fine antenna.
To view the article, copy and paste this link into your browser:
http://www.hflink.com/antenna/butternut/
73 Bonnie VR2/KQ6XA
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EB5ESX
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Rating: 5/5
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May 5, 2008 12:14
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THE BEST
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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I own now the 9V around one year.
It is great. With low swr and great DX operation.
Each email sent to Bencher has been answered really quick and with an excelent answer.
I always recomend Butternut to all friends.
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KB5SEK
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Rating: 4/5
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May 5, 2008 10:58
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Great antenna
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I recently purchased the HF9V, so this review is strictly about installation.
It took me about five hours to assemble the antenna by myself. Butternut doesn't supply any extra parts as most other companies do, and a misplaced #10 hex nut cost me a run to the local Wal Mart to buy more. Assembly was fairly easy... some of the parts could use labels, such as the wire attachments at the top of the antenna and their associated parts. A couple of the coils are also very similar in size, so be careful when assembling not to get confused.
The diagrams in the instruction manual could use some improvement... it's nice to have a diagram to refer to so you can see how this thing is supposed to look and how the coils are assembled. The included diagram is not detailed enough, so I found some pictures from Images.Google.Com of the antenna to make sure I had everything pointed in the right direction.
I installed the antenna on a DX Engineering tilt base. It makes tuning ALOT easier. However, installing on the tilt base does change (at least for me) the tuning settings on the antenna. For instance, the top aluminum tube (4 foot section) had to be completed lowered to get the SWR and resonance figures where I needed them to be for 10 meter operation. The 12 meter tuning section dramatically affects the 10 meter section, so be warned. If you are having problems tuning the 10 meter section, make adjustments to the 12 meter section instead and watch the results. I also used a hacksaw to cut off part of the bottom tube that is supposed to go into the ground, since it was attached to the tilt base instead.
I tuned this antenna with a MFJ antenna analyzer. I can't imagine how it would be possible to install this antenna without an analyzer. I made literally dozens of adjustments to get the SWR to acceptable levels across the board. I have SWR under 2.0 across all of the bands, with the exception of 80m, 10m, and 6m. 80m has sharp tuning and only about 0.300 MHz of the band is usable for me. On 10m, about 1.5 MHz of the 1.7 MHz band is available. On 6m, I can use about 3 MHz of the band before SWR gets over 2.5:1. These bands may end up being improved with a better radial system (I only have 8 radials down at the moment). I was very impressed with the 20 meter band, where the antenna has great SWR of under 1.4 for the entire band, and 1.1 over a small portion! My total time spent tuning the antenna was probably about 4 hours over two days.
For my first few days of operation, I have been limited to 20 and 40 meters mainly, as the DX conditions are pretty bad right now. I've made about 50 contacts using my 100w Yaesu FT-950. So far, if I have heard them, I can work them. Great signal reports have been the norm.
I'll do a follow up review in a few months.
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VE3OIJ
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Rating: 5/5
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Apr 30, 2008 14:19
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6 Months, all is well
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Time owned: 6 to 12 months
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I said i'd come back in 6 months, so here I am. The antenna survived the Ottawa winter, including the 15 feet of snow we had. There was some bending around where the coax connects to the antenna, probably due to the weight of snow.
The antenna functioned well all winter, even after the counterpoise got buried, and even when the snow was 4 to 5 feet deep.
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EB5ESX
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Rating: 5/5
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Jun 25, 2007 09:03
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Great Vertical
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Time owned: 3 to 6 months
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After some verticals...Cushcraft, Diamond, etc ...
I have tested now the HF9V.
This one is the best vertical i have never tested in HF. Excelente bandwidth and very low swr in all bands.
DX with this vertical is really an excelence.
Did a great job last weekend in the EA Contest.
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N2RRR
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Rating: 5/5
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Jun 25, 2007 07:59
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Can't believe it's a vertical
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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Received as a B'day present last year. At the time I was working on my General ticket. After I received my /AG endorsement went home and fired up the HF rig. One of my first QSO's on 20 meters was with a Russian station. He asked about my set up and couldn't believe I was using a vertical. Solid 59 report. The first time I was exposed to a Butternut was 2 years ago at Field Days. Just bought HF rig at Rochester and wanted to try the rig out. My club said I could bring it down to try it out! Used the Clubs HF-6V and made over 115 contacts on 40 meter SSB. I was hooked! Mine is on the roof on my house at about 25'. I made 4 multi band radials as explained in the manual for the HF-9V. Just with the measurements in the manual the swr on 40, 20 and 15 meters is around 1.7:1. The other bands are around 2.2:1, Not Bad! The biggest suggestion I could make is take your time when assembling the antenna. It took me around 6 hours, but man was it worth it! Have worked over 30 states including Hawaii, many European counties, South America and South Africa only using 130 watts out of the FT-102 during the "low" tide (sunspots).
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WR0F
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Rating: 5/5
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Mar 14, 2007 17:53
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Excellent Compromise Antenna
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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For those looking to have a very flexible low profile antenna as to bands with performance this might be the ones for you. We ordered ours about 2 months ago through RANDL.COM and received it less than a week later. Good job guys . Having had a HF6V and HF2V years ago we decided that we would try out a HF9V.
Knowing we couldnt do much untill the spring thaw to put in a ground radial system we put the HF9V together in 2 evenings . No reason to check swr untill spring as we needed to work on the ground radials 1st before finalizing the swr on the bands. Please note GROUND RADIALS not a ground rod .Then the ground rod...for lightning protection
Finally the ground has warmed up enough to accept wire being buried . We installed approx 60 ground radials with the vast majority 32 being 34 ft long for 40 meters and 8 68 ft long for 75/80.
I purchased 2 longer stainless steel bolts to put through the bottom mounting post for hooking up more ground lugs to the bottom portion of antenna for ground radials .I drilled an additional hole throgh bottom post so we could have room for all those ground radial wires to be attached,Cheaper than buying the radial plate I have seen advertized for ground radials.
Finally after all the radials were buried with the wet ground after winter thaw it was time to adjust the bands.
75/80 was just as advertized with bandwidth 60 khz less than 2.1 very narrow .Stretching the Q coil base matching we adjusted antenna to 1.3.1 at resonance. We could have had a 1.1 but than the base coil drastically effected 20 meters . Knowing we like the cw portion we used a sharpie and marked positions on the tubing where the clamp needed to be to move for 3.5 - 4.0 in 100 khz steps. With butterfly nut its easy to loosen and slide up or down the band.
40 meters was 1.9 at 7.000 and 1.1 around 7.125 and back up to 1.9 at 7.300 .Again easy adjustments to move the antenna around from 1 section of band to other by marking positions where clamp would be on the tubing.
Next was checking 20 meters 1.3 across the band. If we adjusted the Q coil for 75 to much than swr resonance on 20 m went up to 1.6 . So we compromised 75 to keep 20 meters down.
30 meters was perfect 1.2 or less .
15 meters we had to shorten the wire to bring it down and than across the band 1.2 or less
10 meters was showing high swr 1.6 and resonance around 29.5 At 1st you think antenna needs to be longer. But than you realize that 12 meters might be effecting 10 . Sure enough 12 meters was showing resonance around 25.2 mhz so we compressed coil and 12 meters fell into place.Then we checked 10 meters and it was 1.3 or less across the entire band.
17 meters was also high in frequency but just compressing the coil brought it down to resonance. 17 m is very touchy and 1/8 inch can move the antenna out of band.With final adjustments it was 1.6 1.1 back to 1.6 in that narrow band
6 meters was perfect at 50.125 .1 MHZ below 2.1
This antenna will do well with the newer rigs that have 6-80 meters and antenna tuner built in.
Now on performance. Their was a dx contest going on last weekend and well on 40 meters we worked 15 stations in less than 1 hour running 100 watts .On 20 if we could hear them we could usually work them. Waiting for band openings for other bands but it works just as well as my HF6V did back in the mid 80's early 90's
Advantages of ground mounted verticals no antenna raising paries are needed and as you get older do you really still want to climb that 60 ft tower to fix the wind damage year after year.
I buried my LMR 400 coax in Plastic pipe from antenna base to the house and years from now I look back and say I am sure glad I have it easily accessible.
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WD5EAE
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Rating: 1/5
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Jan 19, 2007 08:31
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More for your money and time elsewhere
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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I put a Butternut up when I was a kid and the manual was poorly written and poorly illustrated. Thankfully I had an Elmer (an experienced Extra class Elmer) who helped me. His frustration in building it is something I did not forget.
Over 20 years later I was sure the situation would be different so I bought another Butternut. How could it not be improved after so long a time? Well, the manual is still poorly written and poorly illustrated. In fact it looks like the same person put this manual together.
If you try and build this thing and you don't already have some solid experience with this kind of antenna under your belt be prepared for a painful and frustrating project. I ended up building it over some period of days because I would get tired from trying to intuit parts.
The worst thing about building this antenna is that there is a page in the manual showing all the parts. That would be great but then the parts are not drawn to something resembling scale. Some parts are oversized in the illustration. Nor are they drawn with enough detail to determine which part they are talking about in SOME of the steps. None of the parts carry labels. You get plastic bags of hardware which, lacking a natural intuition about what is what, you are left to make guesses, if you are lucky educated guesses. I determined some parts by ruling all others out. Oh joy.
Once its built tuning it is not too much trouble given some time. If you build it according to directions you won't have to tune it if you use an antenna tuner, but you really should spend some time with an antenna analyzer tweaking it to get better performance.
Performance is decent. But forget the power rating (my opinion only of course). I added the 160m coil which was no trouble and on low power (under 150 watts) the antenna works fine.
I believe there are better options and better values and better uses of your time. I am replacing my HF9V with a ZeroFive.
I do not know where this antenna is manufactured, but considering how much this antenna costs (especially when you factor in the add-ons) it is, in my opinion, shameful that after all these years the manufacturer/distributor of this thing has not paid a few bucks to get the parts labeled. Barring that, it would not break the bank to get a decent illustration created for the manual, and get someone to revise the text so that the target market of this product is provided with a suitable construction manual.
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JJ7PMSJ
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Rating: 5/5
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Jul 17, 2005 04:49
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splended for real DX
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Time owned: more than 12 months
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Really I bought HF7V for Japanese users which include 6meter bnd plus HF6V so HF7V.
I add 17meter bnd & 12 meterbands which makes HF9V!. Using more than 2 years,but my QTH is favored with strong winds, sometimes hit by Tyhoon(LIKE hurricane in the USA) . 4 times counterpoises on my second roof top have been broken down. So I decide to set up
tower with 3bands Yagi(BY the way Dr Yagi who developed this ant some70 years ago with Dr Uda
was the professor of the University I grduated from) . Whihle digging the earth with my friend,unforunately water flushed out just 1.5 meter depth. Really FB place for EARTH!!.
And after set up the tower 15 meters high (it is the Maximum height for the ma land!)
Anyway, I foud my QTH is very good for earth,and
took away HV7V+2=9 ,set it at the ground level.
It did really good job especially on 20 meter band. These days, I have worked with South african,and Midddle east stations. For checking my Yagi, I asked for RS reports for both ANT's.
When I worke with Israer station, he laughed at
and said " your simple antenna does good job 58 and Yagi 55 !!" , yesterday I worked with South african station . He sent 58 for Yagi and gave me the comment ," no difference found for your
vertical!" What ! the expensive tower and Yagi
means less to me !! Anyway Butternut HF9V is means great from the cost/performance point of view! I have yet no chance to try eatable
butternut! Hi! Hi!
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AB3CX
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Rating: 5/5
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Apr 25, 2005 07:48
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I Like It
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Time owned: 0 to 3 months
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I got back on the air after a 33 year layoff and decided to go with a single antenna for all HF bands 80-10 M. After reading many reviews I settled on the HF-9V. I understood from reading many old articles written in QST and by the Butternut folks that the radial system was very important. Having the space to set up a ground radial system with minimum leg lengths of 70 feet was an advantage of my QTH. My comments are several. The antenna itself can be assembled in about 5-6 hours. The manual is OK, but more pictures mixed with the assembly instructions would be useful. The antenna does everything claimed for it. I have it tuned fully on all bands with SWR in range of 1.2-2.0 inr the CW segments. Tuneup requires some patience and back and forth. 30 meters was the trickiest to get right, and I found that hand compression of the coil worked better than sliding the adjustment clamp, but this was no big deal. My Yaesu 1000MP Mark V Field tuner does all the work. I dont need the tuner at all on 40M band. It gives me 1.3-1.5 SWR on 20M, 1.2 SWR on 80M, and 1.5-1.7 on 30M. The higher bands all tune fine, but as expected, the range of tight SWR is not the full band on 15M or 10 M. 12M and 17M are just fine for the entire band.
I agree with those who advocate many radials. I started with copper wire, buried, but moved to steel electric fence wire 14 gauge on top of the ground to save cost. Buy it VERY CHEAP at the Tractor/Farm stores. It solders easily with a Benz propane torch and no lead solder/flux. You will need the torch for copper wire outdoors anyway. To avoid burial, use the trick of wrapping the wire around a pole barn nail 6 inches long every 7-10 feet, and drive it into the ground. This keeps it out of the way of feet and the mower. It is totally unnecessary to bury the wire. Radial length is not critical except longer is better. At the center I placed an 8 foot copper clad ground rod (Home Depot) driven all the way in. Create a loop of heavy copper ground wire (about 8 gauge, Home Depot) for soldering the radials to, screwed securely to the rod with the available clamps. I clamped the copper ground bus to the base of the vertical using two screw clamps, which is much more secure than a smaller wire terminal bolted to the base screw post. Right now I have about 50 radials in place and will add a few more. I am amazed by what I hear on the air. The claims that verticals are noisy seems silly; they are sensitive.
As far as performance, it works great. I am getting heard all over the world, with about 50 countries in the first 2 weeks including Diego Garcia, Mauritius, Australia, Sudan, The European, Carribean and South American guys give me 599 frequently on 40 and 20 meters. I tend to get through the pile-ups on 40 right away. Even on the bands where the big guys have beam antennas and a KW, I get through. I plan to try something more than my 100 Watts; I doubt that with a KW I would even think of a directional antenna. An omnidirectional antenna is cheaper, requires no rotation, and lets you hear everything going on on the band since you are not tuning out signals coming from any direction. I can jump into a new CQ quicker than I guy who has to rotate.
I would recommend this antenna to anyone with the space and the willingness to put down the radials!
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