UniBalun dipole setup
Until now, my HF antennas have mostly been off the shelf. I’ve gone out with an AlexLoop (hmm, alexloop.com seems to be down. I don’t know if that’s permanent), and the Elecraft AX1. They’ve both been fine, but have some drawbacks. The AX1 is a bit finicky about getting its radial(s) good enough, and the AlexLoop is a bit tricky to set up in a temporary but stable way.
I have not have good experience with the half wave G5RV, yet, for some reason.
So since all HF antennas are compromises, why not try an inverted V dipole? I had the UniBalun recommended to me, so I went with that. There are some minor things to think about, which is what this blog post is about.
To become an antenna, I also needed antenna wire, and a way to put the middle of the dipole high up, with the antenna wire extending straight diagonally down. For a 20m (14MHz) antenna, I cut two 5.2m pieces, expecting to need to either cut or fold them back a bit, for the right resonance.
On the UniBalun side I could just crimp an M4 ring to attach the antenna wire, Continue reading