Manager


Manager - NA4M
Manager Notes
Reviews Home

Reviews For: M2 40M3L 3 Ele 40meter linear loaded

Category: Antennas: HF: Yagi, Quad, Rotary dipole, LPDA

eMail Subscription

Registered users are allowed to subscribe to specific review topics and receive eMail notifications when new reviews are posted.
Review Summary For : M2 40M3L 3 Ele 40meter linear loaded
Reviews: 3MSRP: 1000
Description:
7.0 - 7.26 x 200 KHz, Typical gain 5.6 dBd Front to back 20dB
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.m2inc.com/
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
0034.7
W5NIG Rating: 2005-11-02
Very impressive! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Well after much pestering and harrassing of K8IA and a few other owners I finally decided on this beam. I had been looking at f12, opti-beam and cushcraft as well.

I've had this antenna up three months and a day as of today!

This antenna has lots of parts and for the novice antenna assembler (such as myself) requires several reads of the manual and attention to detail. That being said I still wound up taking a few things apart and putting them back in a different order. Putting antennas together after working 12 hours is baaaad :)

When I was tuning the antenna according to the manual I shot for centering it up in the middle of the General segment of the phone band.

After tramming it up the tower and getting it mounted I put the analyzer on it and it was in the center of the CW portion of the band! At that point I decided it would be too time consuming (just the way the day was going) to haul it back down and change it, so I left it there.

Works out though as I have been spending slightly more time on 40 doing CW then phone!

Performance. I haven't done any careful testing on it but will give you a fun comparison if you will;

My previous 40m antenna was an older Mosley loaded rotatable dipole. To talk with my friend in Australia in the early AM and have him hear me decently with his 3ele beam I had to run my amplifier. With my ClearSpeech speaker on I still had to lean foward and listen carefully frequently to make everything out. (well not always but you get the point)

...now, wow. The difference between night and day. As long as the broadcasters aren't on freq I aim the beam at him, run about 50 watts (compared to 300 or 400) and sit back in the chair. Easy copy. VERY nice.

My only regret is that I didn't save up more money and just buy the 4 element model to have wider coverage.

CQWW ssb just rolled by too, I worked 4 hours and 45 minutes of just hunt and peck, only wanted to pick up different countries/DXCC spots. I had 70 something contacts total and probably 50 of those were on 40. Lots of fun!

Oh, the required antenna shots!
http://www.w5nig.com/tram/tram2/index.htm
http://www.w5nig.com/40m/index.htm

Michael W5NIG
W1MU Rating: 2003-12-07
Solid Performer! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
My 40M3L has been up for 3 months and I just used it in the 2003 CQ WW CW contest. I feel I can now comment on it. In short, it is a solid performer and at a price of just less than $1,000 it is a good value. Mine is on an 85 foot “mini-Bertha” stationery pole from Array Solutions and it is turned by a ProSisTel rotator. I have a very good location, as the 85 foot pole sits 120 feet above salt water on the coast of Maine in FN53. Lots of things are working in my favor at this QTH.

For a 40M monobander, the antenna has a very modest physical profile on the tower. As others have noted, the linear loading bars also function as trusses so the sag in the elements is quite minimal and the antenna looks, from the ground, like a big 20M beam. The F/B, from observation, exceeds the claimed 20 db. The match can be adjusted and the VSWR on mine is about 1.3 at 7030 kc/s.

The antenna has transformed 40M for me. This is my favorite band but I never had the time or room to put up a monobander. With this antenna, using only 100W I can work most of what I hear from the east coast. I have a clean shot at the afternoon long path and this antenna does a great job with that path here in the late fall and early winter. There are occasions where I cannot work what I hear, such as on morning polar paths, but that’s because the antenna is doing such a superb job hearing stations I could never hear before. Recent examples are stations like S21YY, BG9BA, and JT1DA. It’s great to hear that stuff now and if I really want to work them I need to run more power – 100W just won’t make it on those kinds of paths.

There are some aspects of the antenna that ought to be noted as either cautions or shortcomings. Nothing’s perfect. One thing about this antenna is that it is complicated to assemble. There are, as the saying goes, a lot of moving parts. This antenna was installed with the project management assistance of Array Solutions (WX0B) and I daresay that had I been doing this myself it would have been very difficult. Another concern about the antenna is that the electrical design is in some ways co-mingled with the mechanical design. One example of that is the way the linear loading mechanisms also function as trusses for the elements. As a result, this antenna does not particularly like high winds. Sure, it is quite survivable (physically) in winds but the winds cause flexing in the linear loading mechanisms and that in turn causes the feedpoint impedance to vary. In stillness the VSWR of my antenna is 1.3:1 at its low point but when the wind is whipping around the feedpoint impedance can fluctuate and I have seen VSWR readings as high as 5:1 in winds that I would not consider high. This could be an issue for someone who is trying to operate during windy conditions, especially if you are using an amplifier with a safety drop out for high SWR. My last concern is that although the instructions tell you how to assemble it so that it requires no tuning I elected to tune it more precisely and that would have been impossible without a professional rigger involved. In my case the work was done by K7PN, Paul, and he did an amazing job that I would never have been able to do. If you want this to be tuned “spot on” you better either have good tower skills, or some professional help.

In summary, a solid performer with a few things you have to watch out for. In the recent 2003 CQ WW CW contest this antenna performed quite well and let me claim 743 QSO’s, 112 multipliers, and 34 zones. This led to a total claimed score of 309K. Not bad for 100W from the east coast. In particular I was able to work guys like B4RF and KH2/K7KX – neat QSO’s from Maine with a barefoot transceiver on 40M. I think the opinions of far more experienced guys (like K8IA) mean a lot more than anything I can observe, but consider this a positive vote for the 40M3L.
W8JGU Rating: 1999-12-04
good antenna if you fix the linear loading. Time Owned: unknown months.
this antenna is very well made mechanically. however electrically it is a disaster. m2 uses stainless setscrews pressing against aluminum wire on the linear loading. in a very short time these electrical connections loosen up and this antenna becomes nothing but a nice looking bird perch. now if you make some 3/16 dia aluminum jumper wires and attach them with about $125 worth of aluminum split bolts on all the linear loading junctions you will have this problem solved and have yourself an excellent antenna. most likely it will out perform the standard 2ele cushcraft. the m2 is at 77ft on a steel pole and comparing it with my 3ele full size 40m at 120ft it usually comes pretty close and at times due to signal arrival angle can even have an advantage.
the low frequency end of the swr curve is very steep so keep that in mind when setting the element lengths. a tailtwister rotor seems to handle this antenna just fine.