radiomancanada
Member
Would it be possible to use ladder line for 11 meter dipole ladder line from dipole to a balun inside the house and a coax plugged in the balun to radio.
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11 meter dipole with ladder line
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prcguy
Member
One good thing about 450 to 600 ohm ladder line is its very low loss and can make up for long feedline runs. When transitioning to coax a good 1:1 choke balun is best and not a bunch of coax wound in a coil, I mean one with a ferrite core that is designed to cover your frequency range of interest. You also want the shortest run of very low loss coax getting from the choke balun to the radio, like 10ft or less of LMR400, etc.
Bad thing about ladder line is its somewhere between 300 and 600 ohms impedance depending on size and mfr and a dipole is around 70 ohms and your radio likes 50 ohms. You can still use the ladder line but you will need an antenna tuner at the radio. If you have a real long feedline run then you will instantly see the advantage of ladder line, even though the match between the antenna and feedline will be high as will the match between the ladder line and the coax to your radio.
prcguy
Bad thing about ladder line is its somewhere between 300 and 600 ohms impedance depending on size and mfr and a dipole is around 70 ohms and your radio likes 50 ohms. You can still use the ladder line but you will need an antenna tuner at the radio. If you have a real long feedline run then you will instantly see the advantage of ladder line, even though the match between the antenna and feedline will be high as will the match between the ladder line and the coax to your radio.
prcguy
It sounds nice in theory, but you are better off just using decent coax. You'd need two baluns--one to adapt the radio impedance to the ladder line, and a second one to adapt the ladder line impedance to the antenna. The additional loss from two impedance conversions is probably going to be greater than using the correct impedance feedline in the first place amd eliminating unnecessary conversions..
radiomancanada
Member
Thank you for the info
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