For one man operations, a kite borne long wire is “simple” to setup as Mike will attest. Of course it helps if the WX plays along.
If there were more people involved in the activation you could try using a few kites to support the weight bearing line and feeder and another kite against that line to support an end-fed vertical. If you can keep it all in the air then you can hang a 1/4 wave vertically and get it well above local terrain. It all gets very involved very quickly especially if you have to watch the kites and play radio and look out for other people who don’t want their walk spoilt by walking into your wires or having something drop out the sky on them.
Still kites are huge fun to play with, even kids kites!
Congrats, Mike, for those kite antenna QSOs, particularly the DX with VK.
I had had for quite a long time the same idea in my mind and I finally bought a kite this summer when I was on holidays at the coast.
Before using it as an antenna, I tried it with its standard single nylon rope, just to see how easy or difficult flying that kite would be.
After several trials I realised that the kite I bought was not stable enough as to use it myself for the kite antenna purpose. It needed to many operator interventions, rope pulling and so on, so I finally didn’t use it for the originally intended purpose.
Is your kite one of those with 2 nylon ropes?
How did you hang the wire that you used as antenna? was it in place of one of the ropes or you kept the 2 ropes and the wire was hung from some point in the kite?
Best regards de Guru - EA2IF
The almost 2-wave kite sloping wire on 20m does not seem to offer a great gain advantage ( 3.7 dBi ? )over the 1/2wave wire we normally deploy with poles, trees,…
Anyhow, … The kite antennas seem like a lot of fun and a skill/art on its own!
This is the real point Angel; it’s fun. On the lower bands you can easily implement some more useful antennas though. My all-time favourite remains the 80m 5/8 ths vertical: not so much due to how it performs but due the the gasps of amazement from the people that you work. It might well be a good DX antenna but as kite flying is mostly a daylight activity its advantages are lost. But fun? - yes indeed!
And of course as Mike 'YYY has ably demonstrated, wire in the air always radiates better than wire on the ground.
Unless I find something better before there is enough wind in my region to experiment, I’ll start with the lengths used in this model.
When/If I manage to master the kite aspects, I consider trying a kite supported delta loop that will probably be more useful for 7 MHz during the day with its higher elevation angle.
