Hi Rob,
Fair comment. However one should always track down the original and not rely on some old bloke’s version of what he thinks it is.
It also isn’t easy to describe without a diagram which I am unable to provide here
Well I could say it’s like a j-pole but with the radiator as a folded element.
Except the lengths are much different. Shorter. All 3 wires need to be of the same diameter
And it is broad band in that one cut for 15 m has good swr all the way to and including 10 m.
It is claimed to be efficient and have a radiation pattern similar to a half wave vertical.
I can see it would be relatively independent of the ground but any small antenna that also claims broad band width and good efficiency causes my eyebrows to levitate.
The author is a credentialed European ham so I still take it as a possible contender for SOTA.
Much better to find someone who can provide a copy of the article, or even better, built and used one in the field.
OK, fair comment - so I’ll look it up and see for myself whether it “might be useful for DX but more complicated than an end fed wire.” If I can’t find the article - title and author unknown - I can always ask somebody in a chat group somewhere online to pass on a few details of its’ construction. Nothing like self-reliance and doing one’s own research, eh?
When I first started going portable with my IC-703+ I thought that an end-fed 1/4 wave wire that I could just throw up in tree branches would be super simple and a good idea. I virtually never could get it to work well as far as SWR unless I essentially had the other half of the dipole as a counterpoise. I tried using a number of shorter wires as a counterpoise but results were always variable.
QEX (ISSN:0886-8093) is published quarterly by the ARRL. The November/December 2023 issue has an article titled " The LPi -an End-Fed Antenna with Adjustable Bandwidth". The author is Jacek Pawlowski, SP3L.
This issue has other articles of interest to antenna designers and those who just want to learn.
The contents of QEX are copyright protected hence my reticence to be more forthcoming.
Also QEX is a place for airing new ideas, not all of which will make it into standard handbooks.
