Recs on antenna

Started by Flatus, November 11, 2013, 10:29:09 AM

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Flatus

Noob question here ... I unfortunately live on a corner and have power transmission lines on 3 of 4 sides of my house.  I have a two story house and a lot about 180' by 180'. I have been playing around with my LNR trailfriendly EFHW antenna on 10/40 meters with limited success. Reception has been very noisy and I am not sure if it is secondary to these power lines or not.

To make matters more complicated ... we had a tree fall on our house 2 years ago and my wife was able to convince me to cut down all of the trees on our property except the ones away from the house. (Before I decided to learn about ham radio)

I have been weighing the pros/cons of a dipole in my back yard (any large dipole will be somewhere close to these lines and is hard to erect on our property) versus a vertical. I mainly want to do 10-40 meters (maybe 80).

Thoughts?

Thanks
Kevin

cockpitbob

I'm not expert, but I have a few thoughts.

Without trees a vertical is a good option, but they tend to be noisy.  If you've got noise problems with your end fed, they'll be worse with a vertical.

I'm actually boxed in by power lines on all 4 sides, and the ones in my back yard are 23KV short haul transmission lines.  Luckly things are quiet for me.  If they weren't I would borrow the club's MFJ-852 power line noise sniffer.  The power companies are required to fix noisy insulators and such.  You might see what you can do about sniffing around for the source(s) of your noise.

Does your house have gutters you could connect to a tuner?

Consider my cheap solution.  I have an end fed long wire antenna.  It's just a piece of Home Depot 14AWG wire that goes up the side of the house and off to the top of a tree.  Mine is 180' long and I can tun any band from 6M to 160M with my manual tuner.

Lamewolf

Another option would be a magnetic loop antennaas they are small, fairly efficient, but also fairly quiet !  Just google search magnetic loop for tons of info on building one, and MFJ even sells one already made.