Directional wire antennae

Given the impromptu EU / VK / ZL get together on Sunday, does anyone have recommendations for simple directional wire antennae? I’ve come across an “up and out” - a vertical with a single elevated radial in the direction you want, and HB9SL’s VP2E - an ocfd with the longer end pointing to the DX. Anything that can fit on a single 7m mast, for say 20m band.

Well you don’t have much time to build anything. Keep it simple. Here are my suggestions.

A resonant dipole in inverted vee form broadside to the intended direction will do well. Just get it up as high as possible. 7 m at the apex is as low as I would go. 12 m is not too high. Use enough cord at the ends to get the wire ends 2 m above ground

Chose a site where the ground falls away steeply toward the dx.

A single horizontal wire has a null along the axis of the wire. Using it as an inverted vee makes it a little better although the null depth might still be 10 dB instead of 20 dB.

If you have a 9 m pole then a quarter wave vertical with three or four elevated sloping radials is not much more complicated and is a proven dx performer.

Or you could run half of your dipole vertically and the other half horizontal toward the dx. Fraser described his arrangement in another post. It works.

Run as much power as you can. Even 3 dB extra could bring you above the noise floor.

73
Ron
VK3AFW

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Rather than repeating it, this other recent thread on this reflector has several suggestions that might be of interest in it:

73 Ed.

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Please go here for a HIGHLY effective and extremely simple directional wire array called a half-square.

The wire is a halfwave long on 40M. It is resonant on 20 and 40 (and not bad on 15 as well). On 20M it is highly bi-directional with a low angle of take-off. The phased verticals have the current high so they are not ground lossy, do not require radials, and the feed is at ground level.

73, Fred KT5X / WS0TA / W5YA

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This what I would do for a quick build. It will work well on your 7m pole but works “weller” on a 9m pole :slight_smile:

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Talking of verticals (tho’strictly speaking off topic) I have successfully used a 20m OCF dipole with the long arm vertical and the short arm horizontal. Unfortunately my 10m roach pole proved too fragile!

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Brian,
Sounds like the operation was a success but the patient died.:joy:

Your arrangement will of course work well if the mast holds up… I did something similar with an OCF 160 m half wave. Only 10 m was vertical, the short end was 2 m AGL and the rest 12 m AGL The poles held up. So well in fact that one I left behind was still there a week later.

You could take an end fed half wave and run it as a vertical.

Getting the current maximum as high as possible is always a good move. Bending the ends doesn’t matter much.

Almost anything is better than an Andrew Soup Loop or Super Dooper Magic mini whip.

73
Ron
VK3AFW.

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