Howard's V/UHF Contesting site! (G0VTL) Radio & Aerials

I enjoy many aspects of amateur radio, especially the construction of unusual equipment, and the building of VHF/UHF antennas. Currently I am working on an article for the radio magazine RadCom, about a voice keyer system that I have built.

I have also used a number of antenna programs to design antennas for both myself and the contest group. The most successful to date have been 6 element yagi for 6m, and a 9 element yagi for 4m. Click on the small image to see a larger image (warning the bigger images are 100kb each)

This is the all important picture of me in my shack, note the essential level of clutter required for a shack to be a place of calm!

This was the first antenna that I designed for contest use. It was designed around the maximum available lengths of aluminium tube, leading to a length of 10m. It has a very narrow SWR bandwidth, one of the down sides of over optimization.

This is a four meter antenna under construction. It was designed from scratch in order that G4SIV should have a competitive station on 4m in the Trophy series of contests. The larger image shows Robert G1ZJP working on the matching network

The design work was carried out within a yagi optimization programme, and then the matching was done by trial and error, using experience gained with the 6m aerials above.

My main radios are an IC202, and its companion the IC402. I am also a 706 user, although I do not seem to find as much time for 6m as I would like. The main reason being that I do not have any antennas up at home permanently (yet). The QTH is only at 7m above sea level, and is surrounded by higher ground, this is one of the reasons that I enjoy contesting so much.

Other members of the family into Radio in one way or another are listed here. Roger has a nice site, with the option of filling in a form to get a rotating callsign gif.