Sunday, May 29, 2011

Preparations to put up the Diamond KV-5, a 5 band antenna - PART 1

As where i live i do not have a lot of room, i really can only put up a vertical.
So after some research in what is around, and what is "easily" obtained in Holland, i ended up with a Diamond KV-5 a 5 band antenna for 3.5/7/14/21/28 Mhz (80m/40m/20m/15m/10m)

Yesterday i went to Beesterzwaag for a radio fair and bought my antenna......
This morning i started putting the all barckets....
and after that i started to put together the antenna...

We did need some equipment to get the SWR within reasonable value's.....
The MFJ analyzer was just packed again ......

As the wind is quite firm , and the cable and pipe are not prepared yet, the story will continue later or tomorrow or so :) i am not in a rush.....

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Finaly a full license...

Today i got the results of my exam in Rotterdam....
As i had counted all my wrong answers, which let up to 16 wrong answers, i knew i had failed the test for the second time.

I opened the envelope and started reading what i thought was the letter telling me to hit the books again and go do the exam again in Eindhoven....
I started reading....."we like to congratulate you..."   well thats a bit weird to say to someone who failed....
"35 correct answers"..... I started to realize that one of my answers which were wrong had been corrected and i ended up with just enough to pass the exam....

I can tell you .... i have been in a good mood since :)

Thursday, May 12, 2011

ZS6BKW....

As i wanted to make myself a dipole antenna for field-days, i started to ask around and look on websites. I found a nice website after a chat with a fellow amateur who told me about the zs6bkw antenna. This is the link. http://faberg.home.xs4all.nl/g5rv/g5rv.htm

I am not going to explane all about this antenna, cause it is explaned on that page very well....
If you can't read dutch, or the Google translator is not working that well, drop me a note and i can help out.

I did a really quick field day.... lets call it an field-hour instead to check out if it worked.
And i can tell you, its quiet... no noise at all and the antenna worked  promising enough....
I made a quick QSO with a station 3600 km away.... the first try :)

As you can make 2 versions of this antenna, 1 with 300 Ohm ladder line and one with 450.
I made the one with 300 Ohm line.... Why? well.. i thought about it for a while and the actual dipole which you send and receive with is just a bit longer.... my guess.. more line on the dipole might end up with better reception.... But i did not do any calculations on this.... its based on a gut feeling, so no garanties what so ever.

So the measurements are for my ZS6BKW:
Length of the dipole:  2 times 14.05 mtr
Length of the 300 Ohm ladder line: 11.20 meters 



I made my own center part as nothing in the shop was what i wanted. i wanted to have my wires to be centered in  side of my center part.



On the website you can read that is advisable to feed the ladder line into a choke balun. I did this as well. Choke baluns are easy to make. This is mine....



And when it is all set up , it looks kinda like this....




73's
Alex