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Reviews For: TAK-tenna

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

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Review Summary For : TAK-tenna
Reviews: 156MSRP: $348. USD
Description:
High-frequency antenna for 3 to 30 MHz., inclusive

TAK-tenna is Unique and has been awarded U.S. Patent.

Radiating elements use proprietary copper jacketed alloy

Rotatable - Portable - Stealth - Primary & Restricted Space

Very easy to assemble

Sturdy and well built with low wind load Weighs only 5 pounds Very small footprint >p>TAK-tenna 80 Multibander has a 48 inch boom All other models have a 30 inch boom.

Direct feed with 50 or 75 ohm coax on resonant band User chooses resonant frequency Use coax + antenna tuner...or twin lead + antenna tuner for off resonance operation

Power tested to 1000 CW watts at resonance Key down for 30 seconds and 1400 Watts PEP no heat sensed on antenna wire or coax feed point when touched by hand after power testing

High efficiency = NO lossy matching components anyplace in system Directivity = 10 to 14 dB signal increase in transmit with 90 degree rotation with horizontal orientation Vertical orientation provides omni-directional pattern

Shipping world wide

Product is in production
More Info: http://www.tak-tenna.com/
# last 180 days Avg. Rating last 180 days Total reviews Avg. overall rating
151564.5
N4DXB Rating: 2012-03-06
Got me back on the air! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Easy setup once you know how to resonate and what height to have antenna. One hour to build and 12 minutes to get it resonant. Mine was set for 3.800MHz at 25ft. Excellent on the WARC bands, especially 17 meters. Used QRP rig and able to hit Hawaii from San Diego, as well as St Louis and Nashville. Not junk - follow the instructions and you will have a totally capable antenna that is easily taken down and hidden from the neighbors. I went from a large lot to a tiny one and I do not consider this antenna a compromise. It gives me 80-6 meters coverage, great reports, happy YL & neighbors. Thrilled to so easily be back on the air.
KC0W Rating: 2012-02-19
JUNK Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
A visiting amateur brought over this contraption to the shack last weekend. I was skeptical the second I saw it & was not not let down when we put this "antenna" (and I use that word very loosely) on the tower at 40'.

Put up a dipole or vertical & save your money.
former_AI7Z Rating: 2012-02-06
Junk!!! Save your money!! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Followed the instructions. Even with the antenna analyzer, no go. This is a worthless piece of junk. Even the recycler wouldn't take it.

Buy some wire and put up a dipole and you will be happy and much money ahead.
SV1EEX Rating: 2011-08-27
Simply excellent stealth antenna! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
Hello dear friends. I am not affiliated with Steve or any seller of this antenna. After two and a half years of having this antenna (40m ver), I managed to work more than 100 dxcc entities in total taking into account every band that my tuner would allow (40-6m). I have worked it portable or in balcony. Both hor. or vert. pol. seem to work but the best results for my case were in in vert. Here is a snapshot of my balcony setup http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/695/img0637aq.jpg/ . If you also have tech-scared neighbours or silly forbiding building laws it might be a good solution to get you in the world of HF.
A lot of ppl think that the coaxial is the radiator. I have spent a lot of hours operating qrp close to the antenna when portable with less than 1.5m aircell-5 coaxial. I don't believe that in my setup the coaxial contributes to the total antenna radiation. To test further if this was correct I borrowed another 40m tak-tenna. I also tried to isolate the new antenna with 1:1 balun and put it up with the same coaxial length close to each other. There was no significant difference in my rx from others although sometimes things where a bit worse if I use the balun version by 1s unit on higher bands. Also a field meter didn't reveal any excessive radiation close to the coaxial without the balun. I am not yet conclusive 100% on multiband operation and I would suggest that others could perform similar tests but it seems that for the 40m operation I got the same exactly results in reports. I take my hat off for Steve for his out-of-this-planet support and positive ideas.
He will be definately help you with all issues(if any) that might come up. I am sorry to see that some people didn't make it with this antenna. It is really unlikely that I will press my ptt answering any cq and not be heard on 40m(even if operating qrp).

----------------------
Earlier 5-star review posted by SV1EEX on 2008-12-23

I have had a lot of experience with portable and mobile antennas due to the fact that I consider myself a portable or pedestrian mobile type of ham. So I must admit that I hesitated to believe the other folks that were so excited about the TAK-tenna because I still believe in the laws of physics. It took me about 40 mins the 1st time to assemble the antenna and took it on my roof for testing. The design is smart and it had already given ideas for making one of my own for the 160m band if it was to be efficient.

I live in a house surrounded by huge buldings so things are a bit rough for me down there.
After that, I started testing my antenna against a 25m random wire with the CG-3000 coupler and an l/2 dipole ant for 40 and 20m first with 100w and my ic-7400 then with my ft-817 and not more than 5W.

Worst case scenario was that the TAK was 1s unit below the dipole on 40 and 20m bands. The random wire was equal or less both in rx and tx in all cases. The antenna tuned extremely easily with the internal tuner of the ic-7400 in all bands from 80m-10m except 30m. On 80m I didn't make any qso although I tried so I pressume the antenna is not efficient at all there. It also didn't tune on the 6m band.

Then I tested with the Z-100 tuner and the ft-817. The antenna tuned again easily at ALL bands from 80m-10m. Due to the fact that I can make tests after qrl I didn't have the time to test over the 20m band since muf is going down after noon.

I have had a number of qso's already in digital/voice/cw that assure me that the antenna works ufb in horizontal pol. Here is a response from Andre-f5ukl who was so kind to send me an audio report from my keying in a 20m QSO while I was qrp with abt 2.5W and the TAK-tenna is a the height of 3m (!!)over my roof level.

Here is the mail from Andre

From: f5ukl
Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 9:09 AM
To: 'sv1eex'
Subject: RE: QSO


Bonjour Nik



Thanks again for your reply and QSO.


You'll find the sound of your keying in attachment part.
All my best 73 to you and family and I hope we'll meet again.

Merry Xmas and Happy New Year 2009 to you and yours.
Andre



F5UKL
@ndre Bourguet
22 chemin de Lons
64230 Lescar
France

Then I took it a step beyond. I put the antenna on my g-250 yaesu rotor just to check if the 10 db gain is true if a station is on the H of the antenna. There was very little difference in listening to a station while turning the antenna leftwards or rightwards. But this could be due to the fact that I have solid concrete blocks close to the antenna because of nearby buildings.I tried to pick stations in the scale of 5-7 s units without QSB when the rotor was steady and then stations on the 9 s unit scale level. So my tests was inconclusive this time although on some stations in ssb mainly in the 20m band seem to be better in rx with a little help with the rotor but never dimmed more than 1s unit that is to say abt 6 db of course on the ic-7400 meter scaling. I believe I must check again in a more "open space" enviroment than in my qth.

To conclude I'd suggest 100% this antenna to anyone who wants a stealth primary antenna for qth with fb results or for portable operation. There is no other HF antenna that could be working on a height of 3m over the "ground" level with such results except a magnetic loop, according to my experience.
My compliments to the creator!

73 es Merry Christmas to all de SV1EEX - Nikiforos
KJ2P Rating: 2011-05-07
18 Month Followup- Great! Time Owned: more than 12 months.
My Tak-Tenna has been up for 18 months, and it's still a winner. It's up 27 ft, on a mast made from scrap steel tubing. With my Flex 5000 barefoot at 100 watts, my farthest contacts have been South Africa, Moscow, and Argentina from my QTH in NY, US. I particularly love busting pileups on the first call.
The performance is so close to a previous 66 ft wire dipole, that I removed the dipole. Instead of wire over my wife's garden, this little Tak-Tenna peaks out over the top of a Colorado spruce.
After carefully resonating it during installation, I still have SWR below 2.0 from 7.01 to 7.223, with the best SWR of 1.3 at 7.155. It is certainly usable on 17M and 15M, too, but with higher reflected power and SWR (still below 3.0).
In the 18 months (and two winters) it's been up in the air, total maintenance has been one tilt down for inspection, and then right back up in the air.
I recently put in a kilowatt amp, the SPE Expert. The Tak-Tenna has taken it in stride, all the way up to 1200 watt peaks. Even with a kilowatt, I've never had an instance of RF-in-the-shack (good engineering practices, like grounding both ends of the coax, certainly help).
It works, and I'm happy.

K7CID Rating: 2011-02-18
Exceptional small profile antenna Time Owned: 3 to 6 months.
I've used this in a small backyard where I have HOA issues. From my QTH (Las Vegas) I have made several long distance QSO's, including one recently to Toyko, Japan. Highly recommend this antenna for those who have limited space or community restrictions.
AJ4YQ Rating: 2011-02-04
Great for small footprint Time Owned: 6 to 12 months.
I bought the Tak Tenna several months ago. I live on base at Camp Lejeune and had to go through the frequency coordinator to put up the antenna. When conditions are right, the antenna works great. My farthest contact was Germany at about 2PM on a Sunday Afternoon pushing 100 watts. I put the antenna on a TV mast and placed a 2 meter delta loop on top without any degradation of signal. I am quite happy with it. I plan to take it down and clean it up a bit because of all the hard weather we have been having. Overall, I like it and will probably buy another from Steve...perhaps a 20 meter. You can see the pictures on QRZ.com
KA3TOR Rating: 2011-01-15
Job Well done Steve! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
Thank you Steve for producing a Great small profile antenna, the apartment has granted me permission to put one up.

My first contact was to KB3UHN in BALTIMORE, MD on the 40m band phone with a 58 signal report as the band was closing out!

I say this is the next best thing since SLICED BREAD.

I had no trouble tuning and the MFJ antenna analyzer made the process very easy, and less time consuming.

Steve is always there to help out when needed over the phone or over the net by way of email, and I like the customer support he has for his buyers and future customers.

The 40 Multibander was so great that I have decided to purchase a dedicated 20-Meter version. My hat is off to you Steve!

73 to all de ka3tor
KT7F Rating: 2010-12-13
Very Happy Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
The TAK-Tenna performs as advertised and it went together nicely. The instructions are accurate and easy to follow. It took me about 2 hours because I had to do it single handed. That's correct, I only have one hand and it was still easy and fun to assemble.

I was curious why Steve did not include a SO-239 connection. I asked Steve this question and his reply was untrustworth parts supply quality. I believe his exact words were, "quality varies like a sine wave from off-shore sources;". He also feels that hard wiring is more durable in an outdoors environment. I'm not arguing this point, but I did not want to give up the flexability of my PL-259 connector on my Belden 9913 transmission line, so I made a SO-239 connector. That added to the assembly time.

The antenna tuned up perfectly on 40m 15m ,ok on 10m and adequate for PSK-31 on 20m. I tuned 40m for the CW portion of the band and was under 1.8:1.

I have it horizontally mounted on a 12' foot pole on my balcony. After being antenna challenged for so many years due to antenna restrictions, and a very poor strealth antenna, I was able to work Asiatic Russia, RTOC, on 40m CW during the CW Sweepstakes. While I cannot verify it, I believe I worked RTOC long path. If correct that would be 16,000 + miles from my QTH. Nice to be heard again.

Congratulations to Tak-Tenna on making a very functional antenna at a very affordable price.

73
Tim Factor, KT7F.

K4UZM Rating: 2010-12-11
Worked as advertised, Excellent Customer Servive! Time Owned: 0 to 3 months.
All I can say is WOW.

Talk about customer service. I sent an e-mail to Steve to ask a question about one of his 20 meter antennas. Within a half-hour he called me on the phone. He called me! We talked for a long time about how the antenna works, its geometry, how to bring it back to OEM specifications, and how to tune it. Now for the most amazing part: I didn’t even buy the antenna from Tak-Tenna! I picked it up at a HamFest from a Ham that couldn’t get it to work. That Ham had bought it from yet another ham who also couldn’t tune it.

I had to make it work. I repaired the antenna back to the way it was sent out from Tak-Tenna. Then I placed it on a small table outside the garage and hooked up my MFJ antenna analyzer and tuned it the way that Steve told me on the phone. Within two minutes I had a 1.2 to 1 SWR. Next I put it up on a 12 foot fiberglass pole and re-tuned it in less then five minutes .

That was seven minutes and one phone call with Tak-Tenna. Two Hams spent who knows how much time adding wire and cutting wire off to make the antenna work. Too bad they didn’t ask Steve when they couldn’t get it to tune. Oh well. Their loss is MY gain.

So does it work?

I went in the house and got out my FT-817 and hooked it up to the antenna. When I turned it on there was a station in Massachuset (KC1HD) coming in, so I gave him a call and had a nice QSO with him about the antenna and the weather here in Florida. He gave me a 5-3 report, and I gave him a 5-9 report. Not bad using my 817 and about 4 or 5 watts. It gets better..... When I unhooked the station I saw that I was actually using low power-- 2.5 watts SSB over 1000 miles.

Did it work as well as my dipole?

I don’t know as I didn’t try it. What I can say is that if I lived some place where I wasn’t allowed antennas I would have had a great QSO anyway. Also I could have walked around with this and my QRP rig -- try that with a dipole.

Follow up:

Steve called me back to see how I did. Customer service..... WOW. This is the way all Customer Service should be.

Review:

Two thumbs up!

73, K4UZM Dave