The wonders of the Elecraft T1 are not lost on us in the UK but…
I paid £99 for my Z-817, while the average price is about £119. For that you get the lead for connecting the FT-817 in the price.
The Elecraft T1 on the other hand costs (at current exchange rate) £204.21 if bought constructed with the FT-817 lead. Then we need to add 17.5 % Value Added Tax, 2.5% import duty and a duty collection tariff on about £10 + 17.5 % VAT. A grand total on roughly £256.80, which makes the choice between a T1 and an Z-817 a no brainer unless you are travelling to the US and can slip it in your pocket on the way back.
Having seen what is inside both of them I don’t believe there is anything to choose between them electronically. That said if money was no object I would still have the T1.
By the way I am a firm believer in leaving the lossy tuners at home and using resonant antennas on the hills. The linked dipole is where it is at for me. 80/60/40/20/10 metres on one antenna. I also have some military antennas - un-spool each leg of the dipole to the right marker and I can work any frequency from well under top band up (using a wire dipole gets a bit problematic at 2m and above). The army use a tuner but for the bands we play on and if you are the one calling CQ they are perfect without and no links to mess with.
2010 called and it wants its VAT rate back. VAT is 20% and has been since Jan 4 2011!
There’s no duty to pay on imports like this either.
There’s no need to slip it in your pocket when returning from outside the EU. You can walk through customs on your return and waive it at the nice man with the clipboard as you can bring £345 worth of imports back before you need to pay any duty.
There’s no duty to pay on imports like this either.
I paid duty on mine, and a £12.50 handling fee from
“ParcelFarce”!!
Probably VAT not duty, Adrian. My brother sent me an item from Hong Kong a couple of months ago, VAT charge £2.80, collection fee £12.50. Total pants IMHO.
Commodity Code No 8525209900 “Transceiver apparatus for radio-telegraphy”
If it had you would not have had to pay duty. It’s suprising that Elecraft didn’t put this code or one of the other 0% rated codes on the package as they do this normally.
Don’t confuse import duty with VAT. VAT has to be paid somewhere. If you buy in the EU you can pay VAT where you buy or when you bring it to the UK. But you only pay once and do have to pay somewhere. The PO then charge for collecting any duty. Then they charge VAT on that fee!
The Elecraft T1 on the other hand costs (at current exchange rate)
£204.21 if bought constructed with the FT-817 lead. Then we need to
add 17.5 % Value Added Tax, 2.5% import duty and a duty collection
tariff on about £10 + 17.5 % VAT. A grand total on roughly £256.80,
which makes the choice between a T1 and an Z-817 a no brainer unless
you are travelling to the US and can slip it in your pocket on the way
back.
According to the Elecraft order page the T1 costs $159 assembled. The FT-817 cable at $59.95 is somewhat expensive and frankly unnecessary, but even if you do include it I fail to see how you arrive at a price of £204.21 unless the pound has dropped to parity with the dollar in the last few days, which I suppose is possible.
In fairness, I have recently changed to a magnetic loop. It covers
40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m, is onely 1m in diameter, and
sets up in under 5 minutes. My best 40m DX (its least efficient band)
is 525 miles (850km) an the NOON HOUR! Not bad for a summit
activation - 525 miles on 40m at noon.
As a big enthusiast of magnetic loops, I would be interested in how you constructed the loop element for easy carrying to the summit.
The loop sounds interesting especially as I have a stack of 75Ohm oddball coax here. It’s thicker than RG-123 and 75Ohm so not too useful in a 50OOhm world. But it does have a thick copper foil screen with very heavy copper braid. I’m sure I have some suitable capacitors somewhere for the tuning.
Anyway, today I decided to make a 20m vertical. I use a 5m pole which is a little short for a 20m 1/4wave groundplane. So I made a FMFstick. Or a Buddistick clone. Sorry for the mixed dimensions some came from a US website. Top section is 9ft6 then a coil of 6(ish) turns of hookup wire wound on a 20mm section of conduit, then the bottom section is 26in long. Centre of the coax to the radiator and one elevated radial.
It tunes up nicely on 20m and 17m. For 20m the coil is in situ and the elevated radial is 15ft long. For 17m, the coil is shorted and the elevated radial reduced to 11ft. The radial is a piece of insulated hookup wire and is simply rolled up to the right length.
I tried it this afternoon from the front garden. Using the 817 and 5W SSB I worked S58MU on 20m and got a 55 report. He went on to say my 5w was doing well. On 17m I worked LZ671SWS who gave me a 59 report.
Proof it works? I don’t know how well but it seems to function to some degree. I’ll give it a try on my next activation.
I think somebody needs to have a word with Elecraft about their shipping charges. The T1 is not a large item, I can’t imagine why it costs so much. I bought my T1 as a kit years ago and shipping was only around $40-$50.
You can buy some Elecraft stuff from QRP Project in Germany. I don’t know if the T1 is one of the things they stock, but that might be a better option for us in Europe.
It’s down to whether companies use USPS or UPS. One is The United States Postal Service and the other is colloquially known as Unlimited Profit Systems! (United Parcel Services)
It is hard work getting some US companies to use their own postal service over UPS. I tried to order $24 worth of Zigbee wireless stuff and the UPS charge would have been $130+. I pointed this out and after much arguing that I wasn’t paying 5 times as much for postage they relented and said if I bought $50 of goods they take it to their local post office. This shipping this way came to $13!
In reply to G4ILO:
Elecraft T1 Assembled and shipped $208 (with usps express) Or £126.38+VAT (£151.66 with 20% VAT)
QRP Projects T1 Assembled no shipping 180EUR or £157.33+postage (cant see shipping prices, well not in english at least)
Dollars beat the EURO at the moment it appears, im sure the shipping from Germany is pretty cheap in comparison but ordering direct and not going through a middle man seems the cheapest option, even if it is only a few quid!
In reply to MM0TAI:
Seen as I’m stuck on nightshift this week with not much in the way of electrical maintenance to be done, I just finished making the ‘half-size’ doublet, made it from 1mm flexible wire and a couple if dogbone insulators. Hope to try it out from home over the weekend. If it’s any good I’ll make another from thinner wire for /p work.
Will post updates and links to photos in due course.
In reply to MM0TAI:
Adrian,
Believe it or NOT! I’m Not satisfied with any antennas. Always difficult to found what are the best :I’ve tried several, Verticals, SQUID Dipoles, G5RV, Dipoles, Longwire, EndFed, Inverted L, Wire Delta loop, HB , DK9SQ system etc.
Each time i’m going to the Summit I’ll take two (2) antennas . Most of the summits don’t have trees so dipoles or long wires are out of my choice. I’ve Spiderbeam Mast and DX wire Mast so i can easy setup any Ground Plane, Endfed or Squidd Dipole or wire Delta Loop! But also take my humble homebrew PAC12 … functioning. What i’m saying is you will never be satisfied… This is ONE OF THE GOOD THING FOR THE HOBBY! … BUT REMEMBER MORE IMPORTANT THAN RADIOS…tuners, keys ANTENNAS … MORE IMPORTANT IS THE OPERATOR!
73s frm Marq…CT1BWW
In reply to M6HBS:
Two 22m Flexible Light cables, ten 50mm spacers and one 120mm insulator from dx wire.
One 8m fishing pole.
LDG 1:1 current balun.
Short coax, meter or two to tuner.
Use the 10 spacers for 6m open wire feeder and then just erect the fishing pole and use the rest of the wires as two supports, add one guy wire.
Keep the doublet ends near earth(0-1m) to lower the radiation angle on higher bands.
If you have difficulties on tuning just change the open wire feeder lenght by 0,5m or so, the other wire lenghts are not crucial so don’t shorten the 22m cables.
80m-30m nvis antenna, 20m-10m dx antenna.
Now this is something that I was going to use.
I have same antenna at home qth.
Pros:
Needs only one guy wire
Multiband with minimum effort, especially with autotuner.
More gain and lower angle of radiation on 20-10m bands compared to dipole.
Cons:
I’m a beginner, I must have missed something and this design may be an epic fail.
It’s just a 80m Doublet double inverted v, I dunno the real name…?
Here’s the picture, radiation pattern at 20m band.
In reply to OH9FZU:
The aerial we (GM4YMM and myself) use for most SOTA activations is very similar; 2x13mtrs doublet fed with abt 7 or 8 mtrs of 300 ohms ribbon cable. Connected to a 4:1 balun and an ATU. We use various ATU’s incl. MFJ’s and auto ones from LDG. This has worked fine for us on all bands from 80 mtrs to 10 mtrs; all depending on the propagation on the day of course.
The antenna gain is missing from the plot/analysis. This should be compared to a dipole in free space for example. The SOTA chasers will probably hear almost any antenna, since some of the activations have been done with 100 mW CW power. I can copy that sometimes too.
