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Who said antennas over salt water is the the best QTH?
Name: Patrick (Pat) City: Sint-Pieters-Leeuw (5km South of Brussels) WW-Locator: JO20DT CQ-Zone: 14 Province: VB Membership: 
CTC #: 1337 A short introduction I have been interested in radio since I was 8 years old and finally got licensed as ON1KNP in 1985, right after I finished school and got my first degree in electronics. I served in the army, which was still mandatory by that time and then started to work as an HF service engineer, where I repaired professional (PMR) and HAM Radio equipments. After a few years spent in repair labs of several companies I ended up studying marketing which now is my professional activity. My first operations where mainly on VHF, where I experienced Tropospheric, Aurora and Meteor Scatter propagation modes, running 130W into a 10 elements Yagi antenna. I also made lots of QSO on Russian Mode-A satellites (RS5, RS7, RS9, RS10 and RS11).
As I live in a valley since year 2000, VHF became history. In August 2003, changes in the ITU rules and the Belgian legislation, granted me access the HF bands, without passing the CW exam, which by-the-way tends to become my favorite mode.
My antennas
My QTH doesn’t allow me to install a tower, so I work with ‘attic’ antennas for V-UHF and 10 to 50MHz.
The HF antenna is 10 meters long (2 times 2.5 meters horizontal and 2.5 in 'U'), about 11.5 meters high, oriented East – West, which from Belgium means the American continent, Europe and Asia. Experience showed that QSO on the other axis (N-S) were also possible, but with weaker signals. This most probably is due to the fact that the antenna is not purely horizontal, but also reflections that occur in the attic. On 14MHz, the roof attenuation combined with the shape of the doublet will put it about -2.5dB below a fully erected mono-band dipole, not even half an S-point which works fine for me.
For the lower bands I use an inverted-V antenna, which is made of 2 twin lead legs that are short circuited at the end to form a full size folded (not a trombone) dipole on the 80 meter band. The tip is situated at 1 meter of the house’s wall, about 8 meters above the ground. I specifically looked for a pseudo Omni-directional pattern as well as a high radiation angle to beam above neighbors houses.
Both HF antennas are fed as double Zepp, allowing multi-band operations. A simple advice for restricted space antennas: from the tips of your antenna, go back towards the feed point. Check where the current is maximum and put that part as high and clear as you can, this is where the RF radiation peaks and is most useful. The street I'm living in goes uphill, screening the North path, but with a little bit of patience, I worked FO5, KH6, KL7, R1F. So to the one that don't have a garden and think that an indoor antenna is an handicap, I'll say for sure you rely on the other station pulling your signals out of the noise (sometimes made by big pile-ups), but check it out on 30 meter, where most stations run the same 100W into a ground plane or dipole!
You still don't believe it, well here are some proofs: I contacted 208 DXCC entities, from which 125 are already confirmed ; worked all 40 CQ Zone... just on a piece of wire.
Recommended readings If like me your are looking for good information sources, have a look at these publications:
- The ARRL Antenna book
- Rothammels Antennenbuch (in German)
- ON4UN's Low-Band DXing
My favorite web pages:
- A very nice portal covering many ham radio topics: http://www.ac6v.com/
- Demystify antennas: http://www.cebik.com/
Questions, comments or suggestions are welcome at : patrick.new@telenet.be