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Show all reviews of the CHAMELEON V1 HF Multiband Antenna
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You can write your own review
of the CHAMELEON V1 HF Multiband Antenna.
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ROB1955
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Rating: 5/5
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Nov 6, 2009 13:53
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Amazing little package - I own 3 Chameleon V1 Antennas!
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Time owned: 6 to 12 months
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I own 3 chameleon v1 antennas (home – truck & portable) since February 2009 and I simply love them! The chameleon v1 is extremely simple to setup, especially for a portable station. A v1 portable station can be setup within 5 minutes. This is VERY impressive! The quality of construction is first-rate. This is a professional-quality piece of equipment.
Before buying this, I thought that I'd need a tuner to tune the antenna, but it turns out that tweaking the antenna without one is very straightforward, easy and super fast! This antenna works exactly as advertised – you don’t need a tuner to use it. For a portable station, the unun 9:1, the counterpoise(s) and a good ground is only what you really need. For sure that if you really want to enjoy all bands a tuner is required.
For my portable station I use a FT-817 + 50’ coax cable and I use the LDG-817 to tune on 80M and on 6M as well. During camping the LDG-817 can be very useful because the v1 needs a good ground to obtain a low SWR. So when the ground is not too good I carry some extra counterpoises and I use the LDG-817 tuner. Everything works great! Here are some SWR that I had a month ago with only the unun 9:1 installed:
40M 1.1
20M 1.4
17M 2.4
15M 2.0
12M 1.9
10M 2.0
AA10V (the previous review) was right. The chameleon v1 is a very robust antenna. I’ve lost the count of how many times the antenna hits the ground because of excessive wind or just because I trip over the coax cable. The antenna looks still brand new and works flawlessly!
Once again the antenna works exactly as advertised and even more because on my base station the antenna v1 worked very well on Air Force MARS frequencies (3.3Mhz, 4.5Mhz & 7.6 MHz). So for those who can’t tune the antenna on 80M I would say that something is wrong with your settings and/or equipments! So double check everything and experiment with the v1.
Overall, this is a great piece of gear and perfect for portable and limited-space operations.
73
Rob
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