Longwire Balun Wanted

[Fast1eddie]

Hello Everyone!

Just installed an indoor random logwire, and would like to acquire a balun-perhaps purchase or swap of some kind.

Works pretty well, I'm upstairs in a older wooden frame house. I am using a PalStar R30 and AOR 5000....aside from some minor (yet mildly annoying) electrical noise it meets my expectations.

Thank you for your time!

Ed N3kex

 

[kb2vxa]

Hi Fast and readers,

A long wire antenna will not fit into a house, it's LONG. What you're thinking of is a random (length) wire antenna, both work against ground (you need a ground connection for this) and require no balun. The term means BALanced to UNbalanced, a wire is unbalanced to begin with. A dipole is a balanced antenna and while you can connect coax (unbalanced) directly a balun helps to decouple the antenna from the transmission line so the whole thing doesn't act as an antenna.

"I am using a PalStar R30 and AOR 5000....aside from some minor (yet mildly annoying) electrical noise it meets my expectations."

Your receiver has nothing to do with it, an indoor antenna has EVERYTHING to do with it. Consider yourself lucky, a wire strung around the room is all I can manage and the house wiring radiates something FIERCE. Nope, there's nothing I can do about it, this is not a private dwelling.

 

[IXNAY]

Balun

Something to try concerning the local noise:
Run the wire as a loop around the ceiling and feed it with coax.
Still too noisy?
Run the wire as a loop around a wall and feed it with coax.
The orientation of the wire (polarization) may tend to null the noise. You can use a tuner to run all bands.
If you live 2 stories up, small enameled wire with a weight on the end can be dangled out a window. That could help to get away from noise sources, and would work better than an indoor antenna.

 

[ka3jjz]

<sigh> There are several links for companies that sell longwire baluns, along with a couple of articles on the subject, on the antennas wiki. In addition, the Shortwave antenna Yahoo group has a couple of diagrams on how to wind the balun on a toroid coil for making such a device.

This is one time when a little experimentation isn't going to hurt; and it's neither all that hard nor technically difficult to construct one. Heck, if I can get the parts together, I want to try it just for the learning experience. 73s Mike

 

[racin06]

Hello Everyone!

Just installed an indoor random logwire, and would like to acquire a balun-perhaps purchase or swap of some kind.

Works pretty well, I'm upstairs in a older wooden frame house. I am using a PalStar R30 and AOR 5000....aside from some minor (yet mildly annoying) electrical noise it meets my expectations.

Thank you for your time!

Ed N3kex

If possible, get your random wire outside. For the past few months, I have been using a couple of indoor coaxial loop antennas I constructed. Though the loops do null out some of the indoor noise, I recently found out that just a simple random wire located outside of my house outperforms the loops (stonger signals and MUCH less noise).

My random wire is about 60 ft. in length and runs from the top of my kid's swing set (wood construction) which is about 8 ft. high, down and in through my living room window which is about 4 ft. above the ground. I simply taped the randon wire to the center conductor of a 6 ft. piece of RG-58 coxial. The coaxial piece runs to my antenna tuner which feds my Icom R-75. I tell you what, I never knew what I was missing using those so-called "quiet" indoor loops. I have picked up HAMS in Australia with the random wire. I never heard Australia with the loops. Good luck!

 

[FBG]

Hi

look at here:
http://users.belgacom.net/hamradio/schemas/balun.gif

Else try with GOOGLE and select images and try with :
balun, long wire, ununs ...