SGC-23Ø auto coupler upgrade for my 6Ø foot vertical
The 1Ø through 16Ø Meter vertical antenna lower section
The 1Ø/16Ø meter dual band vertical antenna lower 3 sections showing the PVC insulator and SGC-23Ø auto coupler attached.
The 1Ø through 16Ø Meter vertical antenna upper 3 sections
The antenna is hard to photograph, but it doesn't touch any leaves, and is held upright with nylon tent string. This antenna has survived 2 winters and a summer. It is still straight and solid.
The SGC-23Ø auto coupler upgrade
The original 16Ø meter loading and matching coils were removed from the PVC insulator and the SGC-23Ø installed with U-bolts attached to the insulated surface only.
Antenna Insulator and SGC-23Ø auto coupler.
The SGC-23Ø was mounted on the antenna bottom PVC insulator, to be careful not to let the U-bolts touch on the antenna surface or support bolts. The HV output terminal was connected to the 6Ø foot mast and the ground connection was connected to the 8 foot ground rod, at the base of the antenna, which also connect to the 3 buried, under the grass, ground radials, and the cold water copper pipe. The ground radials are each cut to resonate to 4Ø, 8Ø, 16Ø respectively.
My home brew remote control panel
The SGC-23Ø remote control panel was made with a few parts from Radio Shack.
The control panel has 3 functions. It applies power with a switch, it resets the tuner alignment with a push button, and it indicates when the tuner is tuned with an SWR of less than 2 to 1 with a green LED. I also added a red LED power on light.
SGC-23Ø remote control mounted
This picture shows the remote control and how it appears mounted at my station desk.
I have operated this antenna with the auto coupler on all bands, including the new 5 mhz portion, and it works great. If you have room for a 8Ø or 16Ø meter dipole, you may get better results than I do with the vertical, but I am pleased with this installation. I do seem to be getting better signal to noise on the vertical over my 4Ø meter dipole, and on 17 meters, the signals are the same as my home brew dipole. I do think that at 1Ø meters you may expect better results with a resonate antenna, although with the few signal reports I have so far, the skip signals were the same, but local signals were better on the dipole, this just could be because of polarazation.
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