My Antenna

Living in a pretty quiet suburban housing estate has its disadvantages!. The location is great as the estate has 100 houses tastefully built on an excellent site and proximity to amenaties is also pretty good. So the downer is the size of the garden and a few local regulations about antennas and poles supported from the side of the house or from the chimney breast. I was lucky to have a few good tall trees at the bottom of the garden, The conductivity of the soil is good and a wire antenna should not be too unsightly.

Many years ago the Joystick antenna was marketed by Partridge Electronics. It was 7ft 6 inches in length with a coil placed roughly in the middle. The coil had about 100 turns of wire wound on a wooden dowel which was connected at either end to metal tubing. This antenna was fed with a single wire conductor at one end. If one was to enquire about this antenna, some very impressive log entries would be returned with samples from all of the amateur bands. Two things should be noted here. Firstly it was in times of sunspot maxima and also the ideal set up was to have about 30 ft of wire attached to the base of this antenna whilst it was mounted vertically and insulated from a pole on the chimney or at the bottom of the garden. I bought one of these in my innocence but realised that this was only an end loaded long wire which required a tuner at the shack end. In desperation it is amazing what one will buy to overcome operation on all amateur bands. In fairness it worked ok and I did make many contacts on this antenna.

The antenna at my present QTH is very much on the same lines as the setup mentioned. The inverted-L starts at the bottom of the garden and rises into the tree at about 35 ft and then travels horizontally  for 27ft to the wall of the house. About 3.5 ft from the insulator is a coil with around 100 turns of  18 gauge wire and then another 3.5 ft of wire from there to the insulator. The antenna is tuned with a SGC Auto ATU at the base end and there is a good earth and a few radials he also.

Not perfect but I have a good match to the Tranceiver, can work on all bands, have had a QSO into the States on 80 metres and get into Europe with reasonable reports on Top band. Now that is not the worst case scenario and it beats having to go mobile or portable every time I want to make a HF QSO.