I am a big fan of the 72' vertical wire, fed with a well grounded 4:1 unun, because it is an omni directional, small footprint, discreet, antenna that can manage 6-160m with a good tuner.
I have other articles on this forum about the "ship antenna" as Ronnie and I call it if you are interested in one.
Ronnie has been running one I made @100w for a few years now with great success.
He did, however, manage to destroy it with an amplifier the other day.
This is a quick rundown of how we came to diagnose and resolve Ronnie's issue.
Here is Ronie's UNUN. It easily passed my inital, visual inspection because there are no obvious burns or breaks.
He was also able to listen everywhere and make contacts on 40 and 20, however 80m would not tune or transmit.
I have always been told that a single FT-240-43 toroid could handle 500+ watts and a stacked pair was good for legal limit. (1500w)
The amplifier that Ronnie added had been running at 500w for weeks with no issues, further prompting me to think the UNUN was fine.
We looked at everything else in the station before replacing the UNUN with a 50ohm dummy load and verifying that the UNUN had to be the problem.
I disassembled the unun and found that a wire had an internal break most likely caused by overvoltage.
I decided to rebuild the UNUN with stacked toroids and heavier gauge wire.
Note* You must superglue and tape the toroids together or they will chatter and shatter!
The new 4:1 UNUN tested perfectly.
Then we had hamburgers at Jack Beagles!
Cheers!
I have other articles on this forum about the "ship antenna" as Ronnie and I call it if you are interested in one.
Ronnie has been running one I made @100w for a few years now with great success.
He did, however, manage to destroy it with an amplifier the other day.
This is a quick rundown of how we came to diagnose and resolve Ronnie's issue.
Here is Ronie's UNUN. It easily passed my inital, visual inspection because there are no obvious burns or breaks.
He was also able to listen everywhere and make contacts on 40 and 20, however 80m would not tune or transmit.
I have always been told that a single FT-240-43 toroid could handle 500+ watts and a stacked pair was good for legal limit. (1500w)
The amplifier that Ronnie added had been running at 500w for weeks with no issues, further prompting me to think the UNUN was fine.
We looked at everything else in the station before replacing the UNUN with a 50ohm dummy load and verifying that the UNUN had to be the problem.
I disassembled the unun and found that a wire had an internal break most likely caused by overvoltage.
I decided to rebuild the UNUN with stacked toroids and heavier gauge wire.
Note* You must superglue and tape the toroids together or they will chatter and shatter!
The new 4:1 UNUN tested perfectly.
Then we had hamburgers at Jack Beagles!
Cheers!
