Monday, April 25, 2011

It's time for the High Sierra Sidekick to go....

It would seem the High Sierra Sidekick is not going to do the job in the attic. I have tried it on many bands using WSPR to see what the results would be and they turned out to be dismal. My plan for putting it up into the attic was to could get more use than I was getting from it and I would also have avail to a lot more Amateur bands. With the tests that I did  it turns out the Dipoles in the attic do a much better job. So I am now going to have to consider other antenna ideas focusing on dipole or horizontal type antennas. Ideally I would like something from 15 to 40 meters. (10 meters seems to cause troubles in the shack) There is the MFJ loop antenna that I was close to purchasing but held off on wanting to see how the Sidekick performed. So the High Sierra Sidekick is up for sale now and I will post the news of that here first before it goes up for open sale. It comes with 50 feet of coax, the antenna control box and the jaws antenna mount. The antenna has had about 2 to 3 months of total on air time as it was only out and used during
contests. It also has a very positive rating.  When the Sidekick was taken down this weekend I tried in it's place the Valor/pro Am AB-5 HF antenna that was laying around the shack.  It too turned out to be disappointing as well and is going up for sale. Ideally I would like to have just one antenna that  goes from 15 meters up to 40.....it would be great to have 80 as well but I am talking about an attic antenna with limited space. At this point I have 3 dipoles in the attic if I could reduce that down to one antenna I would have more room for VHF/UHF. In a previous post I was given very good ideas to consider regarding antennas. I was just hoping the Sidekick would had worked out. For now it's the 3 dipoles and my trip to Europe is fast approaching so the antenna issue will have to wait until my return.

2 comments:

VE2GSM said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
VE9KK said...

Good evening Gilles, not sure what happened to your post I did not remove it seemed something odd happened to it. But to answer your question I have not used the Icom AH-4 tuner. I have the Alpha Delta DX33 it seems to be working great in the attic. I am able to get up to 40 meters with a half decent SWR. But for 23 feet in combo with the AH-4 and being able to get 80 meters sounds great. At this time I am happy with the Alpha Delta fan dipole. As for the Sidekick it is sold and has been for some time now. I believe the price I got for it was around 350.00.
Gilles thanks for stopping by the blog and taking the time to comment.....sorry but don't know what happened to your post.