After giving up on 4 Meters I have decided to give it another go. Seems to be a habit of mine I never really give up.
What happened? well I have an old mini cab radio which has been a useless paperweight and not so simple to get it on 4 Meters however somebody took an interest in it and very kindly offered to convert it for me so I said yes
Then I thought to myself it would be nice to be able to actually use the radio and alls I have is a half wave dipole which proved to be lousy and an end fed half wave antenna wasn't much better.
I thought to myself I really need a better antenna. There wasn't very much at all that I could find so I'm having one built for a price. The antenna will be nearly 20 foot long and it should give me 5 to 8db gain.
I look forward to getting all my 4 meter stuff and seeing how it all works. Hopefully I should get some half decent range.
I do perfectly fine on 2 meters with a half wave dipole but 4 meters is lousy on a half wave. I know people will argue its not the case but until you try it you don't know.
2 meters is a lot more forgiving than 4 meters. When set up right 4 meters will travel.
4 Meters. Round Two
- DX-Digger
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Re: 4 Meters. Round Two
I've always found I could get better distance on 2Mtrs Fm than on 4Mtrs FM
On 4M though I find a dipole works better using a 1/4 bazooka Balun at the feed. (see Images below)
Cheers Mark 73
On 4M though I find a dipole works better using a 1/4 bazooka Balun at the feed. (see Images below)
Cheers Mark 73
ʎɐqǝ uo pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ ʎnq ı ǝɯıʇ ʇsɐן ǝɥʇ sı sıɥʇ
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Re: 4 Meters. Round Two
I sell 4m radios and the handhelds really suffer from the poorer performance of the rubber duck antennas. Helicals we know aren’t too bad at VHF and even UHF but at 70, they need to be even shorter and this really shortens useful range which is a shame.
- Werthers
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Re: 4 Meters. Round Two
Thanks, I'll have to try that sometime. I did have an ugly balun on my half wave dipoles I put them on all my dipoles but haven't tried the 1/4 bazooka Balun before.
- DX-Digger
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Re: 4 Meters. Round Two
What I did with the bazooka is I soldered a 15mm end cap and then drilled it with 10mm drill, I then cut about 1" off the sheath of the coax and then pushed the outer sheath and braid down a bit bunching the braid up it was then easier to solder it to the pipecap using a small flame torch without melting the dialectric inside the coax.
ʎɐqǝ uo pɹɐoqʎǝʞ ɐ ʎnq ı ǝɯıʇ ʇsɐן ǝɥʇ sı sıɥʇ
- Werthers
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Re: 4 Meters. Round Two
It looks interesting I will defiantly be trying that out and I will probably do a 2 meters version and a 70cms version as well as the 4 meter dipole and experiment a bit. I do have a much better antenna arriving soon but still always fun to experiment with dipoles.