ke9v.net

I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of the old television show where the host would tell a short story to one person who would then tell it to another and so on until after the story had been passed a few times until the guy at the end of the “chain” would tell it to the audience. Hilarity would ensue as the story told at the end had little in common with the original tale…

I think a similar thing has happened to the details of Cebik’s 88-foot antenna.

Before busting a growing legend, it’s important to iterate the most important rule about HF antennas and that’s any antenna is better than no antenna.

I’ll also add that I’ve tried the 88-foot doublet and had very good results with it. So don’t let what I’m about to tell you discourage you from trying it, especially if you have no antenna at all.

But here’s the deal — most of the time when it comes up on various ham radio mailing lists phrases like, “the very best antenna you could possibly build” or “the perfect HF antenna is..” are employed — almost as though it were imbued with mojo.

Don’t blame LB for this common misdirection. His research and the resulting article is titled, “The Ideal Back-Up Antenna for 80-20 Meters” and folks re-telling this story very rarely mention that this isn’t Cebik’s top choice for a horizontal wire antenna.

An even more important point is that to take full advantage of the benefits detailed by W4RNL, the antenna needs to be installed at the 100 foot level (though he includes plots for installation at both 70 and 100 feet). Read his words carefully:

“The horizontal wire back-up antennas and arrays I have described depend on height for good performance on all bands.”

At those heights the antenna does have some directional properties that can make it a valuable addition to any antenna farm.

However, when it’s apex is installed below seventy-feet, the antenna pattern begins to look a lot more like — well, any other dipole mounted near the earth that’s short on some bands and long on others.

And that’s a rather pertinent detail to leave out of the story — don’t you think?

73 de Jeff

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 3:29 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.