Travel antenna, feed lengths and swr?

[snoack321]

I bought a SOTA antenna (happens to be the mini wolf river setup) and was attempting to setup in my yard and find where 10m, 20m are etc and couldn’t find anything with decent swr. I was using nanoVNA and 6’ for coax. I watched some videos on YouTube how people obtained near 1:1 swr and they were using and recommended 50’ of feed wire?!? Huh. I got my rolls of 30’ and 50’ and sure enough I was able to bring in 10m and 20m at 1:1.057, 1:1.170.

So in addition to radials everyone hauls around 30’, 50’ coils of feed wire to tune their antenna?

 

[prcguy]

The 12" long legs do not provide any ground plane to speak of so that antenna relies on the coax for the counterpoise. In doing that you don't really have a vertical antenna, you have a center fed dipole with one leg laying horizontal on the ground. I would make up some ground radials made of wire, any kind and try three or four radials at least 10ft long each. More is better. That will decouple the coax better and make it more of a ground plane.

I bought a SOTA antenna (happens to be the mini wolf river setup) and was attempting to setup in my yard and find where 10m, 20m are etc and couldn’t find anything with decent swr. I was using nanoVNA and 6’ for coax. I watched some videos on YouTube how people obtained near 1:1 swr and they were using and recommended 50’ of feed wire?!? Huh. I got my rolls of 30’ and 50’ and sure enough I was able to bring in 10m and 20m at 1:1.057, 1:1.170.

So in addition to radials everyone hauls around 30’, 50’ coils of feed wire to tune their antenna?

 

[snoack321]

Prcguy and WA0CBW,

Thank you very much for your explanations which will help me on setting up my travel as well as gutter antenna.

Scott