Saturday / Sunday saw us tear down the minutely designed and executed 28.5m leg triangle and on the spur of the moment, we put one up twice the size. It only JUST fits at 57 meters each leg, and again this is a perfect triangle. At 20m in height, we should have experienced nearly 15dBi towards North America and sure enough we ran a string of US stations all Saturday and Sunday scoring on both days into California with signal reports in the 57s and 58s. Exceptional. But these lobes don’t just work into US, we worked Ethiopia, Brunei, Bermuda, VK9, the list goes on and on. This is a serious loop and great fun for running on – it’s also nearly invisible!
For the geeks, this is essentially a perfect triangle – and it HAS to be a perfect triangle otherwise you won’t get these high-gain lobes. Squares and circles are for the low band cloud warmer brigade, this is for the higher band DX hunters and goodness did it work well. It’s an instant pile-up generator.
Shall we use for CQWW? You bet – and we’re looking forward to a couple of thousand contacts and I’m so impressed with it, that I might put it up again next year for SSB Field Day since as an all-band antenna, it works from 80m upwards. Indeed, it will also work most comfortably on 160m (since it’s really a single wavelength for 160m) but we rarely go down there.
Look out for my Jamboree On The Air report where I’ll discuss this antenna – as well as our success with the Beavers and Cubs last weekend. Needless to say, if having one’s Beavers passing greetings messages to the Father in Law of the Crown Prince of Brunei on 20m band isn’t one-upmanship, I don’t know what is!
73,
Callum.