| N4FDG |
Rating:      |
2008-03-13 | |
| It's great |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
| Can't be beat for a vertical. |
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| W1MLK |
Rating:  |
2008-03-13 | |
| 6/5/4BTV sucks!! BIG TIME. |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
| This antenna is simply junk...period. That includes ANY other version of it as well i.e. 4/5. Do not bother with this thing, go buy yourself a GAP Challenger DX if you really want an HF vertical which requires no tuner and just three 25 ft. counterpoises. |
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| K4MRR |
Rating:      |
2007-12-09 | |
| Worth Every Penny |
Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. |
Mine is simply ground mounted on a 5' mast (3' exposed) with 16 insulated 30' radials.
Granted, it took two days to fine-tune it, but the results are worth the effort. In less than two months, using 100 watts from KY, I've worked Djibouti (599), Maritius (569), Belarus (569), Corsica (589), England (599), Senegal (589), Australia (569), Gibraltar (599), Hawaii (579), Cook Islands (599), Crete (599), Zambia (589), and many more stations using CW on 80, 40, 30, and 20 Meters. Is it a perfect vertical? No. Is it fun for under $200? Absolutely.
Using the 6BTV won't make you a "big gun" by any means, but you'll have a fighting chance chasing rare DX. It will be challenging- but that's the fun!
Oh, the radial system IS THE KEY. I'm adding 16 more next month.
The vertical does very well with most stateside stations, but as with all verticals, its radiation take-of angle makes it a better DX antenna. I use my G5RV for close-in HF contacts. The vertical is much more quiet than the G5RV. I have switched from one antenna to the other listening to DX and can usually hear stations with the 6BTV that are in the noise with the G5RV.
The 6BTV is sturdy enough to stay almost vertical in recent 25 mph winds. SWR curves are similar to those advertised if one has the time and patience to really tune the antenna correctly. Its clean profile helps with the neighbors. I'd buy another one in a minute. |
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| KU2US |
Rating:      |
2007-12-05 | |
| LOVE IT! |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
| I have my 5BTV mounted to a 4' pipe driven 3' into the ground. I have 3 tuned radials for each band I use (20m-80m) including the 80 meter add-on kit. All radials are insulated wire and buried beneath the sod. I added a piece of wire from the top hat to the bottom of the active antenna and now I have a 6BTV. The wire is cut for 17m. I got 3Y0X with this attached add-on wire. You can do this for any band, such as 6 meters or the other WARC's. Antenna is sturdy, well built, and the angle of radiation for DX is superior. Place it away from electrical wires and it is very quiet. Over-all, a great, sturdy, simple to assemble and high quality antenna, well worth the $$$$..Get one.. |
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| W7GMC |
Rating:      |
2007-12-05 | |
| MONEY WELL SPENT |
Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. |
| Its a low cost multiband vertical antenna! I live in a mobile home park and do not have much real-estate. I received the antenna, nicely packaged with straight foward directions for setting up the antenna with/without radials or elevated...I've gone without radial. Put it up, without any further tunning. Using a IC-746 with built in tunner, it easily handles the antenna very well with flat SWR's. An exception is on 80m. Freq is to low, about 3830 after cutting stinger as specified in directions. I'll have to shorten stinger to get band into 3910 for the Montana section net. Love the antenna and easily worked HC2AQ on 15m from MT. I'm a happy owner. Its not a miracle antenna...but it works and didn't bust the bank on purchase. Bought my antenna from www.dxengineering.com. I did add the RF choke from the company and seems to help keep the swr's flat and the rf out. Without any work, I worked half of the stations required for the November Sweepstakes (I could have worked harder to complete the sweeps). Not bad for 100 watts on a ground mounted, no radial, vertical antenna. |
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| SP5DDJ |
Rating:      |
2007-11-08 | |
| VGC - Very Good Choice ! |
Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. |
Dear Colleagues,
Just read all 91 opinions and comments before ordering 6BTV. Upcoming CQWW DX Contest in November gave me a little time to decide what will be my antenna gain on 80m and 40m bands. Having 3 el.beam@35 meters and pair of Inverted Vees for 40m and 80m bands I was looking for the reasonable cheap and good performing low band vertical to get more DX & multipliers during contest. WX was fine that day when I spent along with SP5DED more than 6 hours on the roof of the block. Cut off unused mast down to approx. 2,5m height and made first raise. MFJ analyser was very helpful (always have when you tune the new antenna !)therefore I tilt the antenna only four times. Befor that 6BTV was pre-assembled at home according to manual measures and approximated values for the 80m whip. First measurement gave non satisfactory results except 40 meters. I didn't pay attention on the bands above 14MHz for obvious reason. 80m band was resonating at 3323kHz. Wow...antenna is to long, but why ? The answer was a short metal mast used as antenna support. This mast is insulated from the roof and grounding systems. So I shortened 80m tip by 20 cm and Bingo !. The resonansce of SWR=1:1.0 was where I intended to have at 3520kHz. Measured bandwidth gave good 60kHz with acceptable SWR. Radial system, as described in previous articles and comments was rather challenge on the flat and narrow roof. However I have managed to install total of 9 radials (cut as manual says): two for 80m, three for 40m, 2 for 30m and 2 for 20m. Positioning on the roof gave me theoretical advantage on 80m due East and 40m due West.
First SWL on 80@40 at the same evening convinced me that I've made a good decision. Heard loud W7 on 40m and some W3's on 80m. Comparing to Inverted Vee, signals were more stable and sometimes louder by 1S. Noise level of 6BTV is the lowest I heard copared to many verticals used before. I must admit that living in Warsaw gives you unforgetable experience of density of electromagnetic field produced by every home appliance, TV, PC, alarms and even humans carrying mobile phones. That's why I said good bye to rotary beams for VHF - 2m 16ele. Tonna and 6m 5ele.Cushcraft beam using the rest of the cut-off'ed mast for Hustler support and mounting. I'd say where might be the room for improvement antenna quality: 1) Old fashioned feeding point, very unconvienient and assembly difficult to last. 2) Ordininary clamps MUST be replaced by the best quality clamps. I used dyna type wrench and screwed one clamp. "Borrowed" better but used from 6m beam lying on the roof surface already. No more "complains"..hi..hi
Summary: Spending as low as 200$ is a bargain towards easy assembly and performace. Go for it if you have space limitations or need good non directional contesting antenna. 73'ss Wim SP5DDJ |
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| KA2AYR |
Rating:      |
2007-10-24 | |
| Very nice, but you have to do it right! |
Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. |
I've always been prejudiced against vertical antennas. I've never been able to make one work right over the years. Some of the verticals seemed to be "contraptions." Others "monstrosities." This one was neither.
After my daughter got her extra ticket and my son began studying for general, I figured I had to put up a real antenna. But I didn't want to put up the tower or beam in the yard. So, I bought a 6BTV along with 18m and 60m DX Engineering add-ons. The antenna went together easily, but because I placed it on an existing radial field, there were some tricks to tuning it.
Step 1, get the DXE tilt-over baseplate! I spent several days getting the antenna just right. That meant that I had to lower, adjust, raise, measure, repeat - over and over and over. After much frustration just mounting the antenna to a pipe, the baseplate made raising and lowering a one man operation without trashing the antenna whenever I moved it.
Step 2, I used an MFJ analyzer to make adjustements. The first time my son and I put this in, we spent time running between the house and antenna to make VSWR measurements. An analyzer saves so much time in between measurements. Do the loops in your antenna cable to insure the feedline does not also become a radial.
Step 3, I had that existing radial field. I set the antenna up to the specified dimensions and it ended up in SWL bands. I needed to "tweak" the traps by making coarse adjustments. The Hustler literature doesn't mention this. It was in the 18m add-on kit tuning instructions. I had to do this to all bands and even saw off a few inches of the 40 meter portion to achieve resonance (CAUTION - Hustler's documentation advises against doing this! Some others have suggested that varying radial length would also tune the antenna. Mine were buried and I wasn't digging any of them up! Do your own due dilligence on non-factory adjustments.). Once everything was set up, it was great.
I now have great performance on 80, 60, 40, 30, 20, 18, 15 and 10. The vertical catches so much less QRN than my horizontal dipole that switching from one to the other is dramatic. I never realized how much noise the dipole was picking up in my environment. It's coming down! I've managed to work both stateside and DX contacts on 80, 40 and 20 in the several days I've had this in, and a working station is encouraging my son to study. My only regret is not getting the tilt-over base sooner. It is a time saver and stops the feeling that you're juggling 25 ft. of aluminum tubing above you.
Next, I may put a second one in and play with phasing to steer directional patterns. |
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| VA6LJH |
Rating:      |
2007-07-15 | |
| Unobtrusive antenna for small lots |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
| I bought this antenna to replace my attic antennas. They were interfering with the other tennent in this duplex. I checked a number of verticals. The deciding factor was the fact that the 6BTV has nothing sticking out to interfere with folding it down. I installed this with a DX Engineering's tilt base and radial plate on the corner of the lot kitty corner to this neighbour. The radials were laid from there to the edges of the allowable area which means that they are all different lengths. The short area nearby was covered with "chicken wire" and that was added to the radials. A nearby aluminum shed was grounded to the radial system as well. After laying these down in the fall with lanscapers staples, I let the grass grow long in the spring and then mowed it high until the radials have disappeared. This arrangement is not ideal.The Radials cover little more than 90 degrees of arc. There are about 24 radials. Despite this it works better that my attic antennas, something I did not expect. On the nets I check into my signal strength is as good as many others near me. Something we noticed is that on 40 meters I can hear other vertical antennas better than horizontal ones and vice versa. A ham very close to me tried this with a ham on Vancouver Island who has both vertical and horizontal antennas. He heard the dipole with his dipole better than I did, and the reverse held true. The antenna has been in use through 2 Calgary winters and nothing on the antenna or clamps has corroded or rusted. The only problem I had was with dailey raising and lowering, the tuning sections gradualy came together. I put extra clamps on and don't let it drop into the tilt plate slots as hard as I used to. End of problem. I have no problem with SWR except on 80 if I go very far from the tuned frequency. |
|
| N8QN |
Rating:      |
2007-07-07 | |
| Super satisfied |
Time Owned: more than 12 months. |
Update of my 4/12/2004 review. Average dx RST reports comparing 6BTV to a typical 3 element tribander yagi, are 1-2 s units below.Of course the initial cost and problems of the yagi,tower,concrete,shipping, ordinance restrictions and neighbor complaints, will never compare positively to my initial 180 bucks spent on my ground mounted masterpiece. I'm satisfied can you tell?
----------------------
Earlier 5-star review posted by N8QN on 2004-04-12
V31,MM0,8R1,J37,VP8,3B8,VP9,5V7,ZL,HC,ZF2,HK0,JT1,FG5,KP2,T77,CN,R1FJ,JY,D4,TJ3,5W0,VP5,and 3B9C,8 times, thats the fairly good ones...Purchased the 6BTV on 2/12/04.Running 100 watts,ground mounted with 15 radials.
Thats my input.
73. |
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| KI6EHP |
Rating:      |
2007-05-30 | |
| Great Antenna |
Time Owned: 0 to 3 months. |
| I setup mine this weekend, the performance is great. Its ground mounted with radials. I gotten some great reports. |
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