Very Low Cost Resonant Vertical Antenna Build

[00:00:00]Well, YouTube, Whiskey 3 Charlie Tango, W3CT, your good old friend Jack. Welcome back to my ham radio journey.

[00:00:08]Guys, today we're talking about home brew antennas. Obviously, the the title and thumbnail always gives these away, but I don't know why as a YouTuber we have to announce it. But, we are talking about some home brew antennas.

[00:00:20]And if you look at the sky today, let me show you the sky here without getting the lens very wet.

[00:00:28]It is a very um unstable day at best. Right now, it's actually sprinking.

[00:00:37]It's sprinking. It's sprinkling. But, let's talk about some antenna ideas I have going on in my head that I want to build here on my little property, my antenna farm, and why I really want to have these. Let's get started with that right after this.

[00:01:05]Let's go into the laboratory.

[00:01:08]Haha.

[00:01:12]Or my garage.

[00:01:15]Mainly because, you know why? It's drier in here, that's why.

[00:01:21]But, anyway, I hate sitting in the house. I don't know if you if you're like I am. I hate watching endless hours of TV. Um Obviously, you're watching this on YouTube, so I really can't say I seem to watch more YouTube than anything these days. And my wife always like, "All you do is watch YouTube."

[00:01:39]But, I watch a lot of my friends, a lot of other YouTubers, and I also do it to learn things, obviously, and just for pure entertainment. Uh I think it's because our attention span is horrible anymore.

[00:01:52]But, anyway, yeah, what I'm thinking about today is and it was just not raining. It was just not raining at all. Let me put this tripod down here.

[00:02:03]Oops.

[00:02:08]Tripod's kind of neat cuz I can bend it in different ways.

[00:02:13]There you go. Okay.

[00:02:15]So, anyway, and I don't know if I'm straight or crooked, but this is YouTube. You guys know the You guys know the way it works.

[00:02:23]So, there was a couple lines of thought that I had today.

[00:02:27]I've been wanting to work 30 m. Now, my 10 through 40 m um end-fed half-wave antenna will obviously not work 30 m.

[00:02:35]But, thinking about that, I may throw a tuner on to see if I can tune it to 30 m. I don't know uh if that will work or not.

[00:02:43]But, as I said, I never go by somebody saying it won't work. I got I I like to experiment myself. As you should do, also. You should experiment. Uh you know, it's fun building antennas.

[00:02:53]So, I was thinking I could either put up a vertical antenna or I could maybe put up a a dipole antenna.

[00:03:04]I've never really, outside of being in the field, I've built a 20 m uh resonant uh 20 m dipole antenna.

[00:03:13]But, I've never had one at home, and I think mainly that's because of the feed line and the way you have to feed the coax so far out in that line. I think that's why end-fed half-waves are so popular.

[00:03:24]Also, I believe off-center uh dipoles off-center fed, where you can feed it closer to your house, I think that's pretty popular, also.

[00:03:34]But, I was also thinking I could just throw up a vertical antenna.

[00:03:38]And I want to use, hold it, I got it in my pocket here. I already picked it up upstairs.

[00:03:44]I want to use my banana plug, all right?

[00:03:47]So, I don't need an an an anything with a dipole.

[00:03:50]So, and I don't need a balance, or I mean, you could use play use a choke on this. It might be a really good idea.

[00:03:57]But, you don't really have to. You could just run it right into this, tune it up, and it should work fine.

[00:04:03]Now, being it's raining outside, that's a bit of a problem, right? And so, these are just my thoughts. And yeah.

[00:04:12]So, it's like but I don't want to sit in the house and watch TV.

[00:04:16]And I do want a 30 m antenna. I want a 30 m and a 80 m antenna up is what I need.

[00:04:22]Well, not what I need, but what I want.

[00:04:24]I want 80 m because I told my wife when she's sleeping in the morning, I can crank up the radio and there's never any traffic on 40 and 20.

[00:04:34]10 and 15, obviously, it's going to be just as dead if basically if 20 and 50 are dead, 15 and 10 are dead also. So, that leaves the uh the end-fed half-wave out of commission.

[00:04:45]It also leaves the hex beam out of commission. Because the hex beam, obviously, is 6 m through 20 and it has the uh work bands on there. Which is very nice.

[00:04:56]I wish there was a way I could put a 30 m element on there. But, that's for another day because I have a thought of putting another rotating antenna availability under the hex beam. But, I won't tell you what band that's for.

[00:05:10]Because you're probably thinking 40. And you're probably thinking wrong.

[00:05:14]Yeah, cuz I'm not thinking that.

[00:05:16]But, anyway.

[00:05:18]So, if I get this built today, I'll come back and I'll show you some of the build and what I'm thinking of trying to do here.

[00:05:26]But, I might be leaning towards just putting up a quick 30 m vertical antenna. Now, if you're not a CW op, you're like, "Jack, this 30 m is garbage. I don't like it."

[00:05:36]If you are a CW op, you know that 30 m is a wonderful band. It's clean. It's quiet. Um it radiates very, very well. Pretty much I don't know. I think it follows the 40 meter band more than anything, but you usually morning or afternoon you're pretty good.

[00:05:54]All right. Well, let me get started and think what I want to do here and then I'll come back to you and we'll talk about it.

[00:06:00]Okay. So, in looking at the weather, doesn't look like it's going to be a nice day where I can play with the dipole. Course, might not be raining right it's still sprinkling right now.

[00:06:12]So, what I'm going to do instead is I pulled out one of my crappy poles, okay?

[00:06:18]Fishing pole, crappy pole.

[00:06:21]I'll have the link in the description below.

[00:06:23]This is a very, very this is probably the cheapest kind of mast you guys can buy. And I took one of these actually with me to Puerto Rico and that's where I hung my wire on was this. So, it works very well.

[00:06:34]I just took some rope and I tied it to a fence post when I was in Puerto Rico.

[00:06:39]What I'm thinking about doing is putting a vertical antenna on this.

[00:06:46]Here, I'll give you the measurements.

[00:06:48]For 30 meter if you can see this, I don't know how good this is, but for a 30 meter vertical I need 23.17 feet. Okay? 23.17.

[00:07:01]Now, the problem is in building this antenna right down here this thing looks to be about 18 Uh let's go 18.7, something like that. Okay?

[00:07:24]>> [snorts] >> Uh so, what's going to happen is if I use this pole, okay? And the reason is I actually the top of it these things the tips are ridiculously nuts. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to put it on to my sawhorse.

[00:07:41]And we'll leave some of the wire actually hang over. I'll leave a little droop on the top. Waldoy says that doesn't hurt anything.

[00:07:48]So, I should be able to tune it okay.

[00:07:51]And yeah.

[00:07:53]So, I think I'll use speaker wire.

[00:07:55]Because you know from a previous video that we did together.

[00:07:59]And I redid the wall over here.

[00:08:03]I have a lot of extra speaker wire right here.

[00:08:08]Now, it's behind the bike. See where it went? All right.

[00:08:11]Um I'm going to do some radials.

[00:08:15]And we're going to need 23.17 ft. And I can't get behind it because look how my wife even just She said, "You parked those bikes really close together." Look at that. How close they are.

[00:08:29]I can't get back there to get that wire.

[00:08:30]Anyway.

[00:08:32]I'll get it somehow.

[00:08:33]But uh yeah.

[00:08:35]All right. So, what I'm going to do first is I'm going to cut the wire here.

[00:08:40]And tape it on there.

[00:08:45]Again, we used a banana plug. All right.

[00:08:47]So, I got the wire.

[00:08:49]So, I got to measure this first, but I need 23.17.

[00:08:53]Okay? 23.

[00:08:56]17.

[00:08:57]Or if you look at meters, I'm sorry.

[00:08:59]Here. Let's look at meters real quick.

[00:09:01]Um 7.06 m.

[00:09:07]So, 7.06 m.

[00:09:10]Someone has said in my video they like when I give both. Okay? Makes it easy.

[00:09:14]Less calculation.

[00:09:16]Um [sighs] anyway.

[00:09:20]So, yeah. Let me see what I can do there.

[00:09:24]And radials for radials, I only want to use four.

[00:09:27]I did bring my uh antenna analyzer down so I can kind of tune it. Get it tuned up to where I want it.

[00:09:37]And uh yeah, we'll go from there.

[00:09:39]All right, guys. Let me get taping and cutting.

[00:09:43]I'll bring you back when I get some wire on this thing. I was just looking for Oh.

[00:09:49]Also, I'm going to have to use this.

[00:09:53]So, I'll put this into the ground and I'll slide that pole into there. So, we'll have to figure that out.

[00:09:59]All right, not a big deal. I could do this.

[00:10:02]All right, I'm going to get started.

[00:10:06]Okay. Now, what I wanted to show you was because this gets a little confusing when you're using this mast for a vertical because if you ran this wire all the way down the mast, if you see it would be inside of this PVC pipe.

[00:10:19]So, what I decided to do was put the PVC pipe over the crappy pole or mast or whatever you want to call it, okay? Put it over it first. Whatever you're using it, even if you're going to be using a DX Commander master, whatever mast you may have.

[00:10:34]And then I start measuring this wire cuz this is where the banana clip's going to go cuz this is my feeder element. All right? So, that'll lay right there once I put it in the ground.

[00:10:46]I can put some tape on there and hold it right there.

[00:10:49]Then we just start taping this wire up the mast itself or up the uh And and I know I always get a lot of comments about fiberglass or whatever and it never seems to hurt anything, but we'll find out today when I go to run the SWR uh how it's going to work out for me. So, again, just it's experiment building an antenna, right? So, let's see how it goes.

[00:11:13]Okay, guys. So, I got the antenna built.

[00:11:15]Okay?

[00:11:16]The vertical element anyway.

[00:11:19]That's the vertical element. I have that built. Okay, you see there's a little hang over here going to be on there which it, you know, my wife always says it is what it is.

[00:11:30]Using the banana plug, I'm just going to I'm not going to cut new radials. I'm just going to use my vertical radials that I have in the bag.

[00:11:37]So, I think those will be all right.

[00:11:39]All right, let's go outside here. The rain has subsided for a little bit.

[00:11:46]Be nice if it was subsided for longer.

[00:11:50]But, it might be just enough time for me to get this antenna in the air anyway.

[00:11:54]And uh yeah.

[00:11:57]So, let's see.

[00:12:02]One of the worst tripods ever.

[00:12:04]Uh make sure I'm getting audio. I am.

[00:12:08]All right.

[00:12:10]Let's carry this thing out here and put it into that mount. You can see all the mounts on the ground there, that PVC pipe.

[00:12:17]Works out pretty well.

[00:12:20]>> [sighs] >> All right.

[00:12:25]So, all this does, all this crappy pole does when you use this as a vertical, I just need to take it not hit my end-fed halfway up there.

[00:12:38]Slide it right into this PVC pipe.

[00:12:42]It's not going to be a tight fit.

[00:12:46]Okay, and just dangle that wire down there.

[00:12:50]All right.

[00:12:53]Then, all we're going to do is move some cameras around here so we can get some more action here, right? A little bit more of what's going on.

[00:13:06]All right. Let's put this down here.

[00:13:18]Again, as I said, this tripod that I have for this, it's more of a selfie stick.

[00:13:23]But, anyway, you get the idea.

[00:13:26]All right.

[00:13:28]So, it goes on the positive side.

[00:13:35]I did leave it a little bit longer so I can cut it if I have to.

[00:13:43]Okay.

[00:13:45]So, it's almost touching the ground, but I'm suspecting we'll have to cut a little bit anyway.

[00:13:49]All right. Let me get the ground radios here.

[00:13:56]I did make a pigtail on this.

[00:13:58]On these ground rails, I'll show you.

[00:14:03]It does help better when you're using these banana clips.

[00:14:07]There's the pigtail right there. See it?

[00:14:11]With the four ground rails.

[00:14:14]So, let's put those on to the negative side here.

[00:14:23]Again, [snorts] I'm trying to do this for 30 m. You can do this for anything though. Any band, guys. All you got to do is measure it out.

[00:14:34]Just measure it out there.

[00:14:39]Make sure your terminals are tight.

[00:14:41]Okay.

[00:14:42]Lay this down. Let's get these ground rails separated out here.

[00:14:53]These are actually these ground rails are cut to 3 m.

[00:15:02]Hopefully the neighbors Well, they're not going to come cut grass today, I'm sure, because it's raining.

[00:15:07]Okay.

[00:15:12]Obviously, now it's raining more.

[00:15:14]Of course it is.

[00:15:16]But, I wanted to get this built today, so it's It's porn yet.

[00:15:24]Okay.

[00:15:29]I don't know how you do your radios. I just like my radios out as a star pattern.

[00:15:33]Pretty much.

[00:15:35]Four corners star, whatever you want to say.

[00:15:43]I know. I know. You're going to comment and say Jack, it'd be better with 16 or 36.

[00:15:50]The more radios you have, always the better it's going to be.

[00:15:54]But, hey.

[00:15:55]All right.

[00:15:58]So, the radios are out.

[00:16:06]All right.

[00:16:07]So, let's take one look at the antenna here.

[00:16:10]Since it's raining, getting the cameras in the house.

[00:16:13]All right.

[00:16:14]Stop this Stop the second camera.

[00:16:19]Okay, there we go. To the tip, you can see the top of the wire dangling off the side there. So, will those feed together? I have no idea.

[00:16:27]It's an experiment.

[00:16:30]All right, let's get the cameras in the garage.

[00:16:34]I'm going to get the coax wet, but that's that's all right. That's no big deal.

[00:16:43]All right, guys. Let me get the RigExpert out here and uh yeah.

[00:16:47]Walk you back here with me.

[00:16:49]But, uh get my coax out of the car.

[00:16:55]Now, remember the test coax I use is 100 ft of garbage coax, honestly.

[00:17:02]This is my high-vis DX Engineering coax. I love this stuff.

[00:17:08]All right. What's I do with the RigExpert?

[00:17:12]It's over here on the little bench, right there.

[00:17:16]All right. I'm just excited to see what it's going to be.

[00:17:19]I did leave a little bit extra wire so I can trim it if I have to.

[00:17:23]And yeah, let's see what happens.

[00:17:26]All right, I'll bring you back for the official reading.

[00:17:29]Guys, this is this is unbelievable. This is We're going to try to get a little bit better.

[00:17:37]But look at this.

[00:17:41]You see that? 1.9, 1.8, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9.

[00:17:49]That is pretty good on its own. You could actually hit your tuner and just tune it a little bit and it'll be just fine.

[00:17:55]It'll be fine that way. It's going to work great.

[00:17:58]All right.

[00:17:59]So, hmm.

[00:18:04]You know what we're going to do? We're going to go upstairs into the uh shack.

[00:18:07]I'm going to hook the coax up to it for the shack.

[00:18:09]Go up there, put the SWR meter on just to see where it's at upstairs.

[00:18:13]And yeah, let's try that out.

[00:18:17]Okay, I figured I'd at least show this to you anyway just so you can see. So, this is my 100-ft Amazon coax now is what I'm in, okay?

[00:18:27]Again, don't I wouldn't recommend to buy that unless you're just buying it for like this idea here testing antennas, okay?

[00:18:33]It's going up here.

[00:18:36]I'll show you where it's going.

[00:18:42]See, I have a lot there. So, maybe I can get a dipole. Whoop, don't know. I didn't measure it. Then it goes up right to the shack. Okay. All right.

[00:18:50]We're going to take the RigExpert and go upstairs and see where it's at.

[00:18:54]All right, guys. So, I'm pretty impressed.

[00:18:59]Now, I'm going to put it up on the air here and see how it works, but yeah, for uh for uh 100 ft of coax, it actually brought the SWR down.

[00:19:13]There you go.

[00:19:15]1.6, 1.7. That's with absolutely no cutting whatsoever.

[00:19:22]All right. Let me pull on the radio here and we'll try to see what the Icom 7300 thinks it is. But so far it looks really, really good.

[00:19:33]I do have a choke going from the radio itself to um to the antennas outside.

[00:19:42]And it comes right out of the the radio right into the feed of my switch.

[00:19:48]So change lenses here on the camera so hopefully you can see this better.

[00:19:59]I have been really enjoying these lenses I bought for the for the camera.

[00:20:05]All right.

[00:20:11]It's kind of like a zoom lens.

[00:20:14]Let's go to 30 m.

[00:20:23]Power looks good.

[00:20:27]Check the SWR.

[00:20:32]It's showing about 1.4. That's pretty good. I accept that. 1.4 is excellent.

[00:20:46]We're going to turn the tuner off though.

[00:20:49]Just so you can see.

[00:20:50]No tuner. Let's make sure.

[00:20:55]Try it again here.

[00:20:59]I'll try to get you a better view here.

[00:21:04]There we go.

[00:21:06]Okay.

[00:21:10]That's without a tuner.

[00:23:00]Okay, guys, that's a wrap for this video. The uh caller that I was responding to was from Massachusetts. So, about 550 some miles from Pennsylvania. But, still it proves the It's proved to the concept that you can build your own antennas. And this was cut, honestly, a little bit long, but it tuned up fine, and it was perfect on the radio without a tuner.

[00:23:24]You seen that. I gave you an example of that.

[00:23:28]The added coax actually decreased the SWR a little bit. I wasn't really expecting that, but that's what happened. So, guys, I hope you enjoyed this video. I really enjoyed making this. I love 30 m, and now I can get up on 30 m. It's not really active right at this moment, but at least it's available to me. I know that I can jump on it anytime. Cuz I'll take that antenna and actually put it into a baggie and label it, and then I know I have a 30-minute a 30-minute a 30-m vertical. Guys, thank you for watching this video. I hope it was educational. I hope it was fun to watch, and uh it was definitely fun to do.

[00:24:02]So, take care, everybody. Until next time. This is Whiskey 3 Charlie Tango, W3CT, your go-to friend, Jack.

[00:24:09]This is my ham radio journey. If you're not subscribed, this is kind of videos you get. Why not hit that subscribe button, and give this video a big thumbs up if you appreciated it. And uh I really enjoy it, guys. I enjoy the great community we build here, and I will see you next time. 73s. Hope to catch you guys on 30 m. Take care, everybody. I'll see you next time. Bye for now.