I love playing around with HAM antennas, especially wire antennas, since it is very inexpensive to build an antenna than to buy a one from an Antenna company. Building is also fun and educational since I learn quite a few things along the way. The books which I read are the ARRL Amateur Radio Handbook, ARRL Antenna Handbook, Antenna Compendium and Simple, Low-Cost WIRE ANTENNAS for Radio Amateurs (all available through ARRL) .

When I first got into Amateur Radio, I spent quite a bit of money for my "antenna farm". Since I live in a city lot in the middle of Silicon Valley, I am not able to erect a tower for a beam antenna (Well, owning a 65 ft plus antenna tower in the backyard is still in my dream, but I guess I will have to move out of the Bay Area before that can become reality...) The antennas I bought were normally multi-band no radial verticals because they allow me to operate on more than one bands; and they don't "really need" radials to work (well, they do need radials to work much better!). These multiband antennas are normally expensive. They do seem to work on more than one band, but their performance leave lots to be desired. For one thing, the vertical HF antennas tend to pickup a lot more static noise than dipole antennas. At my QTH, the Butternut HF9VX picks up an S6 noise on 40M and at least S7 noise on 80M on most nights making CW operation on these bands really tough.

   My First HF Beam!

Portable Antenna Launching Tool

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This page was last updated on 05/15/01 at 2100PDT