2006 KØS, Kurt N. Sterba Strange Antenna Challenge

Hosted by Erik Weaver nØew and Dwayne Walker wb5plj,

Memorial Weekend, May 27, 2006

    Here you see WB5PLJ hooking up to the camping cot vertical dipole.

    We used the same balun / breakout box here as we used with the exercise machine dipole (also the same as we used in 2005). The only difference is hose clamps were used to press the ends of the blue wires against the cot frames.

    We then tied a roll of duck tape to a length of rope and threw this up into the tree until we looped it over a branch. Then we hauled the cots up in the air until the bottom cot was about 4-feet above the earth. The two cots were slightly different. The top cot had canvas stretched between the frame rails, and the bottom cot had a set of wires and springs to support a matrice (we didn't use the matrice). The heavier of the two was placed lower in case the whole affair fell out of the tree.

    We used 20-feet of LMR-400 to connect the balun and transmatch (one of the larger MFJ manual tuners with roller inductor). The transmatch and Icom-746 were connected with a one-foot piece of RG-58 coax.

    This too was only a marginal antenna. In fact, we only made one contact with it, but it was a good one! We had a nice QSO with a special event station up in Maine with an island designator (two separate island designators actually).

    After it was too late, we decided Dwayne should have brought down his tennis ball launcher so we could have suspended this antenna between two of my larger trees. We would then have been able to alter it's height above the earth and determine whether adding another 30-feet height would have made a noticable improvement in this antenna's performance. As a general rule, in our experience, more metal and greater height both tend to improve strange antennas.

Camping Cot Vertical Dipole in Tree.
(The lower cot has a wire/spring matrice support which isn't visible.)