20-meter Dipole

I finally got tired of using my makeshift random wire antenna, so last night, I used my new antenna analyzer to make up a 20-meter dipole. Since it's still more or less a temporary antenna, I just used some old speaker wire for the antenna and some old RG-58/U coax for the feed line. I really love my new AA-230Pro antenna analyzer. It made it easy to trim the dipole and get a good SWR. It's about 1.8:1 right now, but I should be able to trim it a little more to get it closer to 1:1.

When I made it last night, I alternated between it and the old random wire + AT-130 tuner and found the dipole was a much, much better receiver, however, I didn't try to transmit. It started raining a little this morning, so I adjusted it and added a few coils of coax at the feed point to keep out the rain and help prevent RF on the outside of the coax. This changed the SWR, so I trimmed another foot off it and she seems to work pretty well. It's starting to clear up, so I'll probably tune it a bit more once everything dries out.

Band watch:

When I checked in this morning, the band wasn't very good and their was a lot of noise. Part of that is due to an ongoing contest -- contests are basically where stations try to contact as many other stations as possible, with an emphasis on distant stations, e.g., the most different states and different countries. With all the traffic, 14300 can get really noisy due to distance stations contesting either on frequency or close by. The contesters don't seem to care too much about the net -- perhaps they don't know about it.

Anyway, I was 59 into Florida this morning, so the dipole seems to be working pretty well. I doubt anyone would have heard me with the old setup. The key to a good random length vertical is of course height, which is severely limited without a mast. I can only get about 9' right now, but that seems to be okay with a horizontal dipole.

Weather watch:

It's finally starting to warm up, so I plan to start working again. But, since I can't really count on good sailing weather until May, there's really no hurry. It's pretty warm right now, but it rained this morning, and should rain this afternoon as well. Therefore, I'll probably spend the day listening to the MMSN and reading. However, I may crawl down in the bilge and work on the transmission if it clears up this afternoon. If nothing else, I should have my radios in good shape by the time I put her back in the water.