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Always looking for new "enclosures" for projects....

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Botttom

This tin is for "Blizzard's Bones" mints. See www.blizzardsbones.com

 

 

It was a pretty nice day for early March in Northern Illinois, so I decided to try out my "portable" setup.  I took my Elecraft K1 out on the back deck, set up my new DK9SQ Vertical-Loop 40-10 meter antenna, grabbed a cigar and got to work!  The set of paddles you see in  the picture is my MFJ 564, but for portable operation, I definitely need to get a different set of paddles and/or a small straight key.  I'm looking at several, including the Palm mini-paddle.
The DK9SQ Vertical-Loop antenna and the DK9SQ telescoping mast are available in the US from Bill Kelsey at Kanga US.  Take a look at everything Kanga US has to offer.

In these pictures, you can see how the DK9SQ Vertical Loop looks when set up.  The loop antenna is designed to use the telescoping mast that DK9SQ also has available (my mast is a MFJ version, but the next time I'll buy DK9SQ's version), and comes with the two smaller telescoping halves that make up the horizontal cross piece.  The entire antenna including the telescoping mast is pretty compact, not too heavy and sets up in just a couple minutes.  It isn't suitable for extended trekking like hiking the Appalachian Trail, but for outings, car camping, emergency use, etc. it's excellent.  You can see pictures of the antenna broken down for transport or storage below.

In this picture you can just barely see the loop wire coming down at a 45 degree angle from each side of the top, and also barely see the lower part of the wire at the bottom.  In the middle, where the mast and horizontal pieces form a "T", you can see the box that holds a balun and where your coax feed line attaches.  I'll call it the junction box.  Going from the junction box and fed to the right is the wire feed, going to the feed point at the end of the cross piece.

This picture shows the entire right half of the cross piece, where the feed point for the antenna is.
Broken down for storage or for travel, you have four pieces - the collapsed mast, the two halves of the cross bar and the junction, or balun box.  The mast fully extended is about 33 feet (10 meters) tall, and collapses down to about 4 feet as do the two halves of the cross bar.  In the far right picture you see the balun box, and permanently attached to the back of the box is a piece of plastic or PVC tubing that the cross piece halves slip over.  I've wound all of the wire for the loop antenna in a figure-eight on the that.

I am very pleased with the vertical loop antenna, it's easy to set up and take down, it's well built, and my K1's Internal tuner can easily tune it to 1.5:1 match or better on each of the 40 - 15 meter bands.  The antenna also covers 10 meters, but the K1 doesn't.