Portable Antenna Recommendations?
- Thread starter Snyperx
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You never did say if you have any relationship with Chameleon antennas. Its odd that you only post about them and virtually nothing else. If you have a relationship with the company you should disclose it so people will know if your posts are sales motivated.
prcguy
prcguy
Yes they're good antennas that are simple to use and perform well!
CHA EMCOMM II - WSPR at 5W on 20M sloper
OMFG prcguy !?!?!? Really again!! That's rich LOL!!
We love you prcguy!!! I don't know what the amateur radio community would do without you.... LOL
OK, I'll ask.
Are you a representative of or associated with any antenna manufacturer, importer, or retailer?
If so, please disclose your relationship. Promotion or sales of products by commercial entities is generally not permitted in the RadioReference forums unless you have prior clearance from the forum owner.
No I'm not but I wish I was! I just like what they do and I'm going continue to talk about them period. I also like AK-47 and Slowstart juicing machine and I talk about them all the time. It doesn't make me a "representative" for Mikhail Kalashnikov, the Russian Federation or an associated of the juicing company.
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Thank you very much for clearing this up. Sorry I confused you with someone else.
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AC2OY
Member
I bought two Comet antennas for UHF/VHF and 6 meters I have a Comet 3200 discone and for HF I bought a Comet 250-B. When my radio comes in and I get all set up I will return to this thread and post pictures and results. My local ham shop guy told me I will do very good due to the fact that my house is stop of s hill. My friend in my club has the 250-B and he does very well with it!!! Needless to say I'm pritty excited to get up and running.
I think so too, but quite frankly, I would have gotten one sooner but the marketing with maps of stations-heard / contacted actually put me off at first as I can do the same with my Hustler 2-foot mast and resonator - it just takes the right conditions and knowledge of current band conditions. It's the man, and not the antenna per se that makes the link.
Thing is, it all comes down to understanding what the antenna is, and what one is willing to accept in the loss department for a tradeoff in convenience and simplicity. Sometimes it matters, sometimes it doesn't.
We'll see - I'm actually contemplating the Hybrid and whip combo, knowing full well that it *may* not be as efficient as my 6 foot mast with a Hustler resonator. I guess I'll find out, but would rather see more technical details rather than maps.
But don't worry - It's all relative depending on who you talk to. The Scorpion guys regale me with tales of how I wasted my money on a Hustler setup. The Hustler guys bag on the Hamstick guys who bag on the guys using the Yaesu ATAS stuff, and so on down the line.
Hey, if the Chameleon gets you out in the field making Q's, instead of spending life behind the keyboard searching for absolute perfection and not populating the bands with some sort of activity, that's a good thing.
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Put my money where my mouth is
So I did it - brought home a Chameleon Hybrid and the approx 9 foot V1L for portable use with my 3/8" mobile mount.
This afternoon, only ground mounted basically, with plenty of radials and an RF-choke, I get it. Works as well as any other hamstick or hustler combo, but infinitely more convenient allowing me to chase the bands. It is also much less of an eyesore if anyone cared to look in the backyard. Never could find a good way to hide the ham-sexy Hustler triple-tree with 3 resonators, let alone being 60's ham-sexy on my truck.
The end result - I can tear any antenna that I bought / built apart 100 ways from this way to Sunday - but I'm on the air being active. I won't bore you with the details of stations heard or worked, as this is all subject to the conditions at the time.
Thing is, as much as I like homebrew, I'll *never* build anything this beefy myself. It is obviously done with care and precision, which is rare these days. My stuff always ends up in crappy PVC pipe, unlike the Chameleon with CNC machining, delrin, stainless etc... One has to know his limitations I guess. PVC was ok, but looks like this Hybrid thing will be around like a Johnson matchbox.
So I've been there done that with extended Hustler whips, rewinding the coils, dx-engineering cap hats at least a radius away from the coil, small unductive shunt coils, folded elevated radials, on ground, gullwing near the shore, sleeping with ON4UN's and Jerry Sevick's book, W8JI / K0BG info and whatnot under my pillow...... It is fun but I'm kind of over that, although it has it's place.
20 meters and up it works well, but I have NO illusion as to how well a 10 foot mobile antenna will work on 160 or 80m. Let's just call these my "rx only" bands with ANY of my mobile / portable antennas, or it is just the guy on the other end doing all the heavy lifting. If I want to get real, I'll be swapping out the whip with some real wire over a branch at least on these bands....
The antenna isn't a dummy load - but like all antennas, it is what YOU make it. I'm very happy so far but I understand what it is, and what it isn't.
So I did it - brought home a Chameleon Hybrid and the approx 9 foot V1L for portable use with my 3/8" mobile mount.
This afternoon, only ground mounted basically, with plenty of radials and an RF-choke, I get it. Works as well as any other hamstick or hustler combo, but infinitely more convenient allowing me to chase the bands. It is also much less of an eyesore if anyone cared to look in the backyard. Never could find a good way to hide the ham-sexy Hustler triple-tree with 3 resonators, let alone being 60's ham-sexy on my truck.
The end result - I can tear any antenna that I bought / built apart 100 ways from this way to Sunday - but I'm on the air being active. I won't bore you with the details of stations heard or worked, as this is all subject to the conditions at the time.
Thing is, as much as I like homebrew, I'll *never* build anything this beefy myself. It is obviously done with care and precision, which is rare these days. My stuff always ends up in crappy PVC pipe, unlike the Chameleon with CNC machining, delrin, stainless etc... One has to know his limitations I guess. PVC was ok, but looks like this Hybrid thing will be around like a Johnson matchbox.
So I've been there done that with extended Hustler whips, rewinding the coils, dx-engineering cap hats at least a radius away from the coil, small unductive shunt coils, folded elevated radials, on ground, gullwing near the shore, sleeping with ON4UN's and Jerry Sevick's book, W8JI / K0BG info and whatnot under my pillow...... It is fun but I'm kind of over that, although it has it's place.
20 meters and up it works well, but I have NO illusion as to how well a 10 foot mobile antenna will work on 160 or 80m. Let's just call these my "rx only" bands with ANY of my mobile / portable antennas, or it is just the guy on the other end doing all the heavy lifting.
If I want to get real, I'll be swapping out the whip with some real wire over a branch at least on these bands....The antenna isn't a dummy load - but like all antennas, it is what YOU make it. I'm very happy so far but I understand what it is, and what it isn't.
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Outbacker / MFJ 1699 / Opek hvt-600 mod - use a mast!
More playing around ....
For kicks picked up an MFJ 1699t with 3/8 mobile mount thread. Like most, not impressed with the pot-metal stinger, but works if you know it is fragile up front. Another bummer is that the stinger thread is 3/8, but is NOT the standard - it is just a little smaller preventing me from using replacement telescopics and such from other manufacturers. So be careful, or be sure to bring along some solder lugs, brazing rod and some dikes to the campsight.
Note - the 1699 is very different and much beefier from the pencil-thin and frustrating to adjust model 1899, which was for qrp rigs like the Yeasu ft817 with a bnc mount.
As a portable, instead of elevating a 4 foot antenna on a camera tripod, I thought it would be better to actually put some antenna under it, like a 4.5 foot Hustler mast which was laying around.
Ah, much better. At least on 40m and up. I'm not masochistic enough to put rf into a 2 foot long base loaded skinny coil with 2 feet of whip on 80m.
Compared the system to my standard bag of Hustler whips and resonators. Now that the 1699t is on a mast, CASUAL results seem similar to each other. On 40m, it is about the same as using the high-power kilowatt coil. Of course 80m is improved greatly by using a mast, but still - I'm not going to waste my time there in any case with an antenna this small.
When doing the comparisons, on 40m and up, I accounted for the "wander lead" shorting out the bottom of the coil, and that in itself serving as about a foot or so of built-in mast, so when compared to a hustler resonator on a 4 foot mast, I used a 3-foot mast and the 1699t.
The cheezy stinger construction means that I won't be using this mobile - but if I did, at the very least I'd mount it on a small Hustler mast, like the 22" MO-4 threaded rod and a spring.
In the end, with a mast this 1699t is just a different option than carrying around a bag full of hustler resonators as my standard setup for portable use.
More playing around ....
For kicks picked up an MFJ 1699t with 3/8 mobile mount thread. Like most, not impressed with the pot-metal stinger, but works if you know it is fragile up front. Another bummer is that the stinger thread is 3/8, but is NOT the standard - it is just a little smaller preventing me from using replacement telescopics and such from other manufacturers. So be careful, or be sure to bring along some solder lugs, brazing rod and some dikes to the campsight.
Note - the 1699 is very different and much beefier from the pencil-thin and frustrating to adjust model 1899, which was for qrp rigs like the Yeasu ft817 with a bnc mount.
As a portable, instead of elevating a 4 foot antenna on a camera tripod, I thought it would be better to actually put some antenna under it, like a 4.5 foot Hustler mast which was laying around.
Ah, much better. At least on 40m and up. I'm not masochistic enough to put rf into a 2 foot long base loaded skinny coil with 2 feet of whip on 80m.
Compared the system to my standard bag of Hustler whips and resonators. Now that the 1699t is on a mast, CASUAL results seem similar to each other. On 40m, it is about the same as using the high-power kilowatt coil. Of course 80m is improved greatly by using a mast, but still - I'm not going to waste my time there in any case with an antenna this small.
When doing the comparisons, on 40m and up, I accounted for the "wander lead" shorting out the bottom of the coil, and that in itself serving as about a foot or so of built-in mast, so when compared to a hustler resonator on a 4 foot mast, I used a 3-foot mast and the 1699t.
The cheezy stinger construction means that I won't be using this mobile - but if I did, at the very least I'd mount it on a small Hustler mast, like the 22" MO-4 threaded rod and a spring.
In the end, with a mast this 1699t is just a different option than carrying around a bag full of hustler resonators as my standard setup for portable use.
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sloop
Member
Check out hfpack web site, they field test different antennas for portable operations and rate their performance.
The hfpack shootouts with the verticals are good. They generally show the progression in efficiency with small loaded antennas ranging from a resistor with a wire attached to something a bit better....
1) Don't use bottom-loading or helical loading if you can avoid it. Use lumped mid or perhaps 2/3 loading instead.
2) Use an efficient coil form.
3) Use capacitive top-hat loading, but not so close to the coil that you make the coil less efficient with too much close-proximity capacitance. Hats belong on the top. A radius away or so is good.
4) Never forget you are using a small antenna to begin with, so even if made out of solid gold, an 8 foot antenna is an 8 foot antenna.
Of course the tradeoff when portable is how practical you need it to be vs efficiency.
That being said, from a practical standpoint with the 1699t, the tap points don't change when adding a reasonable mast, but your stinger gets a little shorter.
Since I don't like the idea of constantly re-tweaking the whip for every band change, I carefully adjusted it so that on most bands, I'm on either the high or low side of resonance within about a 3:1 swr ratio, and let the internal rig tuner handle it. The only odd-man out when set this way was 20m, so instead of changing the whip length, all I needed was an alligator clip with a 1-inch tail when used on that band.
Taking it further, if one wanted to be spot-on with it without tweaking the whip, set the whip for what turns out to be the shortest length of the band of interest. Carry a few alligator clip pigtails for the other bands. Not ideal but workable for short stint portable use.
1) Don't use bottom-loading or helical loading if you can avoid it. Use lumped mid or perhaps 2/3 loading instead.
2) Use an efficient coil form.
3) Use capacitive top-hat loading, but not so close to the coil that you make the coil less efficient with too much close-proximity capacitance. Hats belong on the top. A radius away or so is good.
4) Never forget you are using a small antenna to begin with, so even if made out of solid gold, an 8 foot antenna is an 8 foot antenna.
Of course the tradeoff when portable is how practical you need it to be vs efficiency.
That being said, from a practical standpoint with the 1699t, the tap points don't change when adding a reasonable mast, but your stinger gets a little shorter.
Since I don't like the idea of constantly re-tweaking the whip for every band change, I carefully adjusted it so that on most bands, I'm on either the high or low side of resonance within about a 3:1 swr ratio, and let the internal rig tuner handle it. The only odd-man out when set this way was 20m, so instead of changing the whip length, all I needed was an alligator clip with a 1-inch tail when used on that band.
Taking it further, if one wanted to be spot-on with it without tweaking the whip, set the whip for what turns out to be the shortest length of the band of interest. Carry a few alligator clip pigtails for the other bands. Not ideal but workable for short stint portable use.
Snyperx
Member
Time for a resurrection So I am leaning toward the ELF antenna to give me some capability with my FT-60 on 2m/70cm bands. From the research I have been doing it would seem this would be a great option for what I am trying to do. In my OP I stated HF, but that was in error. I will be working in the 2m and 70cm mostly.
So I am leaning toward the ELF antenna to give me some capability with my FT-60 on 2m/70cm bands. From the research I have been doing it would seem this would be a great option for what I am trying to do. In my OP I stated HF, but that was in error. I will be working in the 2m and 70cm mostly.- Status
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