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Reviews For: GAP Challenger

Category: Antennas: HF: Verticals; Wire; Loop

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Review Summary For : GAP Challenger
Reviews: 91MSRP: 259.00
Description:
Multi-Band HF Vertical
Product is in production
More Info: http://www.gapantenna.com
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
00914.4
KC2DBJ Rating: 2004-04-29
WONDERFUL MULTIBAND ANTENNA Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
The Gap Challenger is a vertically center-fed dipole in the form of a verticle.The antenna requires a day or so to assemble.The instructions can be a wee bit intimidating but if you read carefully and take your time in doing so,the antenna will have minimal or no problems at tune up.The 75m Capacitor which is connected at the top of the top section may give you a little trouble to connect and the jumper wire may have to be connected from the inside.This antenna is top heavy when either using the drop, or tilt mount(optional) so have 3 people to help you.The most critical aspect of this antenna is in its counterpoise.Although the recommended 3 wires @ 25' is published."CHECK YOUR GROUND SOIL CONDUCTIVITY"Most hams never bother with this and a mismatch can occur on all but 80 & 10 meters. If you have layered soil and you are not near sand or seawater,or on rocky terrain or on shale.you must increase the counterpoise to 3 wires @ 30' in order to get a good match.Use an MFJ SWR Analyzer or tune up manually the old fashion way. If the SWR receeds a little add more wire(s) until it is optimal on all bands.At 10 meters you may get a perfect match of 1:1 at around 28.45mhz. It will tune up on the repeater input freqs.of 2m but don't expect much gain with it.On 75m SWR was better than 1:5:1 at 3.875mhz.This antenna must be guyed it 3 places as the mount is not enough against winds over 70 mph.
WB8THR Rating: 2004-01-02
Wow. Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Wow. I got the Challenger together in about two hours time - I found the instructions I got pretty easy to follow, even with the hand-made drawings. Mounted the antenna with three guys, installation was pretty straightforward, used some nylon rope guys, located 50 ft away from the house. I set up the 25-foot guys as described, then tested it at low power on the air. I was very happy to see that the SWR curves were exactly as GAP promises, though I got a bit better bandwidth (180 kHz) on 75 that advertised.

So, since I've only had it up 72 hr, how does it work? I put it through a bunch of testing over New Year's, using a Yaesu FT897 transceiver. On the "standard" DX bands (10-12-15-20) it works just like any other vertical. Minor improvements is signal over the old MA5V I have up. On 75, the antenna works OK, but not outstanding, but still credible enough to make the antenna usable 3750-3930 kHz. The big difference was on 40M. Tested it comparing with my dipole at 30 feet and the difference is astounding. I was able to break pileups on 40 CW and SSB and was S9+20 into South America from Wisconsin whereas on the dipole I was only S5-7. While the antenna is not supoosed to work on 30M, I find that the SWR is about 1.6:1 over the full bandwidth without a tuner. Pleasant suprise. Can't get it to resonate on 17, so for that band I will put up a simple wire vertical. On 6, the antenna resonates very well - one previous reviewer mentioned that his Challenger resonates well on 6 but can't hear anything - that's because the band doesn't open much and only rarely during the winter. On 2M, the antenna resonates very nicely and was able to hit a repeater located about 25 miles from my QTH.

So far, I am sold on this - I'll be taking the MA5V down and saving it for portable ops. I'll post another review later in 2004 after I get a chance to play with it in a few of the spring contests. Once I get the blown finals fixed on my FT-817, I want to try QRP and see what I can do.

73,

Fred K9FWH
WB2GFN Rating: 2003-11-06
It works! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Had it up over a year. On tilt over base. It MUST be guyed... at least with our winds. Gotton RESULTS on every band, including 17 (with tuner) but 2 wasn't so hot. As other reviewers say, the instructions need a bit of better graphics, especially when you're lying on your living room floor, trying to figure out where goes which. But -- It WORKS! ( actual rating 4.8 ( 2 meter eh, and diagrams, feh.)
K4HPP Rating: 2003-07-04
10 year user - satisfied Time Owned: more than 12 months.
The GAP challenger was chosen for my QTH because the house is surrounded by numerous very large trees thay made it difficult to erect just about anything else. It fit nicely in a clear spot in the backyard about 50 feet from the house. I found the instruction manual a bit crude but it was easy enough to follow. Total assembly was only a couple of hours. Digging the darn mounting hole took a lot longer! It is set in concrete and guyed with dark poly rope. The antenna was installed 10 years ago and has never been down. After 10 years, the rope still looks OK. All bands have less than 1.3 to 1 SWR at resonance and less than 1.5 to 1 on full bands except for 80 and the extreme top end of 10 meters. It is about 1.2 to 1 on 6 meters.

I'd rate the overall on air performance as fairly good. 80 meters is poor, but I have worked 49 states(need KH6) and about 30 DXCC countries on 80 CW. 40 and 20 seem to be the best bands for this antenna. It compares favorably to other verticals I have used. 15 meters and up, performance falls off. I make plenty of contacts, but never with really outstanding reports. During the recent sunspot maximum, I worked 6 meters for the first time ever (licensed 44 years) and managed to work 22 states on CW and SSB.

I run a TS2000 at 100 watts or less output on all bands. In addition, I run QRP with an Elecraft K1 at 5 watts. Using the GAP on 40/20/15 at QRP, I worked all states and 65 DXCC in the last year! Needless to say, overall I am pleased with the performance of the antenna. I have only had one occasion to call the factory and found them very courteous and helpful.

During the 10 years the Challenger has been installed, it has been through a major ice storm (1994) and several intense thunderstorm winds and has been struck by falling tree limbs. The antenna came through all this totally intact!

For limited space installations, I can recommend this antenna and give it a rating of 4.
K2CBI Rating: 2003-06-28
Much better than I expected Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I put up my GAP Challenger a few days more than a year ago. It is the only antenna at my QTH and I chose it mainly because I thought it would be easy to erect. It was a two day project. The only hard part was digging the hole and pouring the concrete in our rocky soil. Assembling and setting up the antenna was easy. I did not guy it at first, but did a month later to avoid the chance of metal fatigue at the antenna base in the future. I used lightweight black Dacron covered kevlar rope for the guys, with a stainless hose clamp holding them 2/3 of the way up the antenna. Easy. Black made it much more acceptable to my wife! (Harder to see).

I'm amazed by how well I did with this antenna in a year. Worked 200 DX entities on phone, mostly on 20m sideband. Almost always, if I could hear them, I could work them. Almost always I get signal reports as good or better than I give (based on my S meter). I'm still working full time, so this was not by being on the air all day every day.

Maybe my QTH is terrific for DX. I don't know. This is the only antenna I have so I can't compare. Maybe a dipole would have been just as good. Don't know.

I'm very pleased with my experience with the GAP. After having been away from HF for a long time, it seems to me that working DX is a lot easier than it used to be. In good measure because of the antenna, I think.

I've used it successfully on 80, 40, 20, 17, 15, 12, 10 and 2m. It's not advertised as working on 17, but it does. Don't know why but I've never even heard a station on 6m. The antenna does load up, but I can't hear any stations.

I've read other reviews on eHam from people who had poor luck with it. Not my experience at all. I'd buy another one in a heartbeat. No radials is a big plus.

Mike
K2CBI
Mount Kisco, NY
N3HKN Rating: 2003-05-09
GAP "tuning" Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I have had my Challenger for about 5 years. Currently behind a townhouse, 12ft from the building tied below the mid-point to an elevated deck's railing. At a previous location (2 acres) it performed well and needed no fiddling. Now my resonate point on 40 meters is around 6.5mhz. So, based upon the previous post I cut the radial wires (3) to 11ft and the resonant point 1.2:1 is about 7240. at 7000 the swr is 1.5:1, At 7300 it is still 1.2:1. Tells me that the efficiency is probably lower than it should be due to wide bandwidth and the proximity to the house is the issue.

Gripes about the antenna - "coax hole" eventually cuts into the insulation. The joints have frozen together and it will take heat to seperate them. The instructions are poor. No explanation of the SECRET tuning rods (what does what). Finally it terrifies me to look out the window during a storm and see the deflection of the GAP. Obvioulsy it is rugged since I an't broke it yet.
Disk N3HKN
K1DX Rating: 2003-05-07
Good materials, but needs tweeking Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
General comments:
I cannot give much of a performance report at this time, but I found the materials supplied to be quite excellent. Overall, this is a good product for the money. I made two calls to Gap’s support number (new area code is 772, not 561 as stated in the manual) and got excellent help. Based on the good materials and excellent telephone support, I rate the antenna 4/5, no thanks to the manual.

The manual is quite poor. Gap needs a professional technical writer and an illustrator to clean up their manuals. And, the rewritten manual needs to be tested by a first-time installer.

Assembly:
Time to assemble: 2+ hours. The instructions are poor as was stated by other reviewers. The illustrations are especially poor. It would help if Gap supplied “Top Cap” values that you could select during assembly to put it where you want on the 80M band. Gap gives no hint as to how to tune this antenna, but they are helpful on the telephone. Read other eHam reviews for tuning information. And be sure to read those comments before assembling the antenna so that you can plan ahead.

I did follow the advice by Gap and others and added UV resistant guy ropes about a foot above the gap. This also aided in leveling as I completely assembled the antenna before putting it in the ground. I then filled the base hole with rocks and tamped them in securely.

Manual organization is also a problem as you might want to alter steps based on your installation needs. Also, I found it much easier to assemble the base to the antenna prior to putting it into the hole in the ground. That is because the coax is very difficult to feed through the base hole while trying to insert the antenna into the base. I do not recommend starting by putting the base in place and securing with concrete as a first step. So plan ahead! Carefully read all of the instructions several times before doing anything.

Tuning:
80M was as advertised. Resonance is at about 3845 kHz, and 2:1 points are about 3785 and 3915 kHz. Gap support specifies 3200 pf 500V top capacitance for 3500 kHz. 3000 pf would be a better value to raise the center frequency to about 3550 kHz. I believe they use two capacitors in parallel to get the total value. I didn’t change my cap yet, but they will exchange the cap else supply one for $14 at the time of this review. At resonance, the VSWR on 80M is 1:1.

40M was a real problem. With the specified 25 ft counterpoise wires, resonance was approx. 6.5 MHz, or so. I gradually cut each wire and checked resonance, bringing it to 7.030 MHz. The wires are now only about 10 ft long, each. (Burying the wires also made them appear longer. And I suspect that rain may have an effect on them, as well.) This adjustment also brought 15M to within spec. According to Gap support, ground conductivity affects the counterpoise requirement, and that some people actually add wire to make the antenna to work properly. The SWR at 7.0 MHz is 1.1:1 and 1.6:1 at 7.3 MHz. The SWR at 21.0 MHz is 1.7:1 and 1.9:1 at 21.4 MHz.

20M also was a problem with resonance above the band edge, and a 2.2:1 SWR at 14.000. I corrected that by adding a short piece of EMT (conduit tubing) to the long bottom tuning rod, bringing resonance to about 14.050, and SWR of 1.5:1.

12M is OK without adjustment. 10M is OK from 28.0 to 29.0. SWR at 29.5 is 2.5:1.

Other Comments:
The antenna has some oddball resonance points according to my MFJ analyzer. 6M is not well matched, but 2M is 1:1 at 145MHz. VHF SWR readings are very lumpy as the antenna has more than one peaks and valleys within each band.

As for WARC bands, I didn’t try the 17M modification that one reviewer posted, but I may at some point. The SWR at 10.1 MHz is 3:1 and rises going up the band. It might be better than a wet string on 30M, but it certainly isn’t designed for that band.

Would I buy another Challenger DX antenna? It’s a bit early to answer that question because the bands have been rather poor lately. However, several years ago, I owned a Cushcraft and I found it to be an excellent performer. And, this Challenger DX replaces a ground-mounted Cushcraft AP8 that worked reasonably well, but not as well as the R7 (but then, the R7 didn’t have 80M). I will add a performance review once I’ve used this antenna for a few months to a year. I’d be glad to hear of your experience with the Challenger DX.

73 and good DXing.
N8QLT Rating: 2002-08-12
Does the job Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I live on a typical small city lot in the Historic District, so a low profile, multiband HF/VHF antenna like the GAP Challenger is just what I wanted for my Icom 706MkIIG.

Assembly and Instructions: The instruction manual has crude drawings which, unless studied carefully as you ID the parts, can cause confusion. GAP should spend a few bucks and do the illustrations professionally. Assembly was uneventful as long as you have correctly identified the parts beforehand. I was able to dig the hole for the PVC mount by driving a wooden dowel of the same diameter into the ground and then pulling it out (done several times to get the proper depth). It has been up through wind and soaking rain, and is still solid. No concrete or backbreaking post-hole digging. Nice tight fit and the antenna sits in it nicely.

Quality: Overall it's good. I did have the wire pull right out of a spade lug connector during assembly- had to recrimp it. Also, while tightening the 4 screws that hold the base to the antenna, two of the screw's heads twisted right off. I was using a common hand screwdriver, and I'm not Arnold Schwartzenegger. However, I was able to rend solid metal screws with my bare hands during assembly. GAP, supply better screws.

Profile: I camouflage-painted it. It sits next to a blue spruce in my backyard, just 30' from the sidewalk, and no one has noticed it. Living in the Historic District means that I have to give some consideration to stealthyness, and this antenna blends right in once painted.

Performance: Works great on 80 - 10m. The SWR on 6m seems to have some odd peaks and valleys, but 2m is disappointing. I can bring up the local repeaters, but a J-pole mounted at 20' on my garage seems to outperform this antenna on 2m. Make sure you have a real 2m antenna, and just use the 2m side of this one for a backup.

I have used an auto antenna tuner with the antenna, and have had great results on 80m- can tune easily from 3775 to 3999. I also have access to the full 10m band with the tuner, and unlike others I do not find the antenna to be deaf on 10 or 15m.

On 6m I have been successful with Meteor Scatter contacts and working SSB and FM. No local FM repeaters to test with around here.

Overall, for the money, I got an antenna that fits my lot-size and location requirements, and offers good performance on many bands in a compact and easily-installed package. I compared the MFJ, Butternut, Hygain, HS Antenna and Cushcraft offerings before purchasing the GAP Challenger, and am satisfied with the product.
WB2WIK Rating: 2002-07-03
Excellent, but be careful! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
I owned a GAP Challenger DX-VI (the original model, predecessor to the current product but nearly identical) for several years, having first purchased and installed it in early 1993. I was the first one I knew to actually use one, and I wrote the product reviews for two magazines on this product at the time.

In all, I'd say it is excellent, by design and construction. I criticized the assembly instructions, and hope they've improved by now (the actual assembly was far less complicated than the instructions would seem to indicate). The Challenger is a serious "DX" antenna on 40 meters. Very serious. In switching back and forth between a properly-installed Challenger and a 2L 40m Cushcraft Yagi (40-2CD) at 55', I often found the Challenger at least as good, and sometimes better, than the shortened Yagi.

It's a pretty good performer on 75/80, as well, and does a respectable job on the other bands. Key in making this antenna work properly is stringing out the three 25' long wire (insulated) radials properly, assuring the base is strong and perfectly vertical, using lightweight rope guys above its midsection for support, and avoiding installing the antenna physically near anything conductive -- and I mean anything. My first installation, with the Challenger about 25' from a wrought-iron fence that ran along my property border behind the antenna, yielded terrible results. I had to move the antenna farther away from the fence, then all was well.

After 6-1/2 years of exposure to the weather, here's what I found:

-The standoff insulators that support the vertical rods that tune the antenna were not very UV-proof, and had deteriorated a great deal, to the point of almost crumbling. We have very strong sun exposure here, and this may not occur in more northern regions, but it was surely a problem in southern California.

-The insulated wire straps that connect the feedpoint to the various vertical rod elements were also not very UV-proof, and the insulation had cracked and fallen off the wiring. Further, two of the wires had broken completely, at their spade-lug terminals.

-The antenna requires more frequent maintenance than once every 6-1/2 years!

But, while it was all together, it was a stellar performer. I have since erected three more Challengers, at other locations, and have been satisfied with them all.

WB2WIK/6
N1OU Rating: 2002-07-01
My last comment Time Owned: more than 12 months.
My Challenger has been up and on the air for over a year now and I still think its great.

Due to my prior posts on this forum, I get quite a few e-mails and I enjoy answering questions. I've even sent pictures to hams who were considering the Challenger. Please write me at fghubbell@worldnet.att.net if I can help.

Final comment: The Challenger is a vertical dipole, not a standard vertical. Vertical dipoles like the GAP and Force 12 line are fed at the center and don't require radials. Regular verticals (like Hustler, Butternut, etc.) may or may not require radials depending on what you seek. Nevertheless, adding them increases radiation efficiency. A regular vertical (not a vertical dipole) may resonate (low SWR) without radials but may not radiate well. The radials always help it. In short, if you need to avoid radials, avoid regular verticals and stick with vertical dipoles. Both (regular verticals and vertical dipoles) can be excellent antenna systems when properly installed but you should choose based on the bands you want to work and the mounting conditions you face. Neither system is superior to the other. GAP builds a great vertical dipole. Butternut builds a great vertical.

73 and great "vertical" hamming!

N1OU