Simple Ham Radio Antennas

A nice weekend construction project from Dave Tadlock (KD0ZZ).The 10 meter band is one of my favorite hangouts. You never know when propagation will smile on you and reward you with a nice DX contact. Although Dave's antenna is not a "ground plane" antenna in the purist sense (a ground plane is always elevated to decouple the radials from the actual ground and, thereby, reduce ground loses), the antenna is well designed and will give you many hours of fun on a band which exhibits both HF and VHF characteristics. You could also modify a standard CB (11 meter) stainless steel whip (102 inches/259.08 cm), add four elevated radials, and raise the bottom of the whip to a height of 16 to 20-feet/4.87-6.09 meters above ground level. Good results can be obtained with Dave's or my somewhat cruder project. The idea is to build your own antenna and experiment. Have fun! For the latest Amateur Radio news and events, please check out the blog sidebars. These news feeds a...

Another great video tutorial from antenna guru Dave Tadlock. This time, Dave designs, builds, and uses a simple ground plane antenna for 10 meters. Although Dave says his design can be ground mounted, a true ground plane antenna is always elevated to decouple the radials from the actual ground to eliminate ground losses. Dave's instructions are clear, precise, and often humorous. I've built several ground plane antennas following Dave's lead. The hardest of the lot was for 40 meters. In order to get the radial system off the ground, I had to use a slingshot and a length of weighted nylon rope to shoot the vertical element to a branch about 40 ft/12.19 meters above ground. With the bottom of the vertical element at 7 ft/2.13 meters above ground, it was easy to attach four, sloping quarter wave radials to the coax connector and tie them off at pre-positioned stakes. It's a lot easier to build a 10 meter ground plane. If you chose a frequency of 28.400 MHz (in t...