I was talking with Ivin W9ILF yesterday and he was asking me if I remembered the hamstick verticals he made a couple summers ago. I remembered I had one of the stands/connectors he had made for me. It's pretty straight forward.
Ivin basically took a piece of flat aluminum, and drilled in a hole for the antenna stud and a smaller hole that he threaded for an aluminum "spike" about 12-14 inches long, made from aluminum rod and threaded. The way this works is you push the spike in to the ground, connect the hamstick to the antenna stud, and connect your radials to the wingnut. Yesterday Ivin was using this antenna on 20m with a set of 8 radials each about 12 feet long. He worked Hungary on CW with 5 watts of QRP power. Pretty cool huh?
Here is his setup from yesterday:
So what you need is some flat bar aluminum stock, 1/4 inch aluminum rod material, antenna stud, and a tap and die set so you can tap the small hole and thread the aluminum rod, and a ham stick. Sounds like a trip to the local hardware store. The antenna stud hole does not need to be tapped.
Best 73 de KB9BVN
I tried the same idea but had it mounted to my bike for portable ops when stopped. I used 4 radials for 20m but it really did not work all that well for me. I moved on to other antennas for portable op's.
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Mike
VE3WDM
Mike the ground mounted version with at least 8 radials seems to be halfway usable....I wonder if you would have had more success with more radials. It's certainly no half wave dipole at 10m height...but it's nice and portable.
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