Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Arrival of new antenna

The End-fed antenna I have now is the W1SFR KX3 helper End-fed antenna. It's a great antenna and is working nicely. It is very well-made along with a 100% satisfaction guarantee, I have been very happy with mine and have used it without issue as a full time antenna. So with all this positive feedback why am I looking at and purchased another End-fed antenna? The W1SFR has a maximum rating of 100 watts. With my digital operations I have to be mindful that my End-fed is only rated at 100 watts max and I imagine that is an SSB rating. The other "thing" is the W1SFR uses the coax shield as the counterpoise and it has been causing me some grief at my  home station, some lights and our washing machine. I wanted to stay with an End-fed antenna as it fits on my property nicely and over all I am very happy with the performance of the End-fed type antenna. The antenna I decided on is from Ultimax Antennas and it's their Ultimax DXtreme, their 33 foot model. You can order the Ultimax antenna with lengths from 33-124 feet. I chose the 33 foot model as it just fits my property nicely, it would be great to go for something longer but at this time I am going with easy and convenient.
On the Ultimax site it says that the DXtreme antenna covers 6m to 160m and that ALL DXtreme models are of a different design that work most efficiently with the length of wire it is sold with. This End-fed antenna has a rating of 2kw which is more than enough of a buffer for me. Unlike the W1SFR End-fed antenna the DXtreme has provision for a counterpoise. I ordered the counterpoise that Ultimax offers for their antennas. As with most End-fed antennas an antenna tuner in needed and I have my new LDG AT200proII. I will be interested to see if I can get the antenna to tune on 80m! I would imagine the bandwidth may be narrow but that is where the AT-200proII tuner comes into the picture with its ability to call up a memory tune in no time.
The DXtreme antenna arrived here last week but the weather has not been co-operative for me to install the antenna. I don't want to rush the installation as some heights are involved and at my age, I don't bounce very well anymore!

4 comments:

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello Mike, I hope the new endfed/AT-200 will be a winning combination for you. However personally I would not have invested in such a antenna/tuner. With that money I would buy a real good autotuner for the outside. The nice thing is that you can tune almost every length of wire and with the tuner in the feedpoint of the antenna you have no extra coax loss. I use such a combination with my vertical (tower as counterpoise) but you can think of a lot of other combinations. Last year I used the tuner to feed my tower with a kind of gammamatch, it did work very well. Many here in europe work with autotuners outside. A good cheap product is the CG3000 autotuner, if you really want state of the art you can choose something like Stockcorner tuner (www.stockcorner.nl). Just my thoughts for improvement in the future. 73 and good DX. Hope to see you on 60m one of these days. 73, Bas

VE9KK said...

Good morning Bas, thanks for your honest feedback I really appreciate that. To honest I had never even thought about putting a tuner at the base of my antenna. I looked up the CG3000 autotuner and it looks like a very nice unit and as you said it is a very good price. LDG has a similar product but only in a 100 watt or 600 watt versions. You are very correct this will for sure give me something to think about for the future.
73,
Mike
VE9KK

Anonymous said...

Please let us know how things work out after the installation; use of counterpoise, SWR and performance. Thank you.

VE9KK said...

Good afternoon Anonymous, I sure will be posting the results but it's a bit cold out there to be putting up an antenna and counterpoise.
73 and thanks for stopping by.
Mike
VE9KK