Best Bet in HOA

[KI7QVR]

HH all,

I'm in an HOA but they don't care what your backyard looks like. I currently have an inverted V with the apex at about 25' with an angle of about 30 degrees. I can see from Grid Tracker that most of my contacts are to the NE. Since I'm in AZ, there isn't much left to the SW. My antenna, over the last 7-8 years is clearly biased toward the northeast and southwest.
My question is, do I increase the angle of the wire or look at an omnidirectional vertical. I do have 4 guy ropes up to keep it stable and it works well. I am renting and have a 35' telescoping fiberglass pole buried in the dirt so it's not going anywhere.
I'd like to maintain range as well as hit all directions, on a budget. What do you suggest? I would wrap a wire around the mast, not problem. I already have a 1:1 Unun at the apex.
Currently, at the apex, I have two wires in an inverted V configuration. I can operate 10, 20 and 80 meters without a tuner but 80m is around 3:1.
I've heard good things about decent, omnidirectional, multi-band antennas. What do you suggest? As long as the blue-hairs can't see it from the road, (I'm in a 2- story house), they don't care.
One last comment, I realize you can tune a lawn chair. That's not what I want. I want a good antenna that can do 10,20,40 and 80. If I have to drop 80, that's okay.
What are your thoughts?

 

[EAFrizzle]

One last comment, I realize you can tune a lawn chair. That's not what I want.

But it would be so much fun for it to be a lawn chair in the front yard, near the sidewalk, so that the old biddies dear, sweet  harridans ladies could sit and rest... 😎

Inverted Vs are pretty good in that situation, but if you want more bands, you could try the 43' wire vertical as a sloper. Feed it at the top, and you can move the bottom around as needed. That, and perhaps a wire running the length of the pole as a reflector might be worth considering.

 

[kh6idf]

When I was renting a house in Phoenix (2011-2012) I used this 10/20/40 antenna, ran from an 8 foot pole attached to the railing on a 2nd story balcony down to a post in the ground about 50 feet away: Par EndFedz® EF-10/20/40 MK II antenna SO-239

That is a QRP 25-Watt max version (I was using a 5-Watt Yaesu FT817), they also make a higher power version which includes 15 meters: EF-40-10-KW 1 kW ICAS antenna

Found a picture of the antenna setup in PHX:


Still using the same antenna here in TX.

 

[Robert051952]

My HOA strictly prohibited any antennas until I educated them with OTARD. They reluctantly agreed that I could put up a TV antenna. The HOA failed to specify how I could mount my TV antenna. They were fine with a 20 foot pipe as a support. I just installed a Hustler 6 BTV. It is the mast for my TV antenna (a folded dipole made with 300 ohm line) which is zip tied to the vertical about 18 feet up. So far, no issue, TV and ICOM 7610 work great, although not at the same time.

 

[merlin]

3:1 is not so good. Something that may help that is a terminated folded dipole in sort of inverted V. configurations are flexible with this sort of antenna. The true omni would be like a vertical, flagpole antenna. you still need a remote tuner at the base and decent ground or counterpoise.
The terminated dipole, you need a 1K ohm resistor, wattage to handle max power and a 16:1 balun. No tuner and you may even get suitable work at the bottom of 160 meters.

 

[AK9R]

@merlin These terminated folded dipoles are interesting, but seem ambiguous. "Any length required to fit the space" with less than 2:1 SWR over 1.8 to 54 MHz?

 

[mmckenna]

@merlin These terminated folded dipoles are interesting, but seem ambiguous. "Any length required to fit the space" with less than 2:1 SWR over 1.8 to 54 MHz?

I've got a commercial T2FD at work and it does provide very low SWR across the HF bands. The radio stops at 30MHz, so haven't tried it on 6 meters.