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Lamco have added a new product to their range. A Cobwebb antenna. It goes under the name of a MyHam HF-7B and it is specified as an antenna with a useful range of 20/17/15/12/10/6/4m bands.

I noticed this in the latest Practical Wireless and thought I’d email a copy to Mike Corke, ZS1RJQ who has now made 6 of these. We are both users of the Cobwebb but both of us have homebrewed versions. I was interested to see how much his cost to make and like me, he spent about £40 making each of his. Mine  was a little dearer on account of me making a few experiments along the way. We both had a little chuckle at the cost of this commercial version at £249.

If you need an HF antenna then it seems that the commercial versions are very expensive and homebrew antennas cost a bit in time but a lot less in terms of £. I buy my bits and pieces from all sorts of places but AMTools / Spratreader on eBay has all the bits you need for the hardware for a much lower price. If you don’t see what you need then just email him and I’m sure he’ll be able to help.

If homebrew isn’t your thing then there isn’t much of an option. But it seems it’ll cost you for a simple piece of hardware. I’m sure if I were to every build my own rig it’ll look like a dogs breakfast and perform in a similar fashion but simple bits of wire shouldn’t cost that much.

(Just to clarify I’m not singling out any one supplier, but just observing that off the shelf stuff can cost a fortune compared to home made stuff.)

Last summer I built myself a Cobwebb antenna and was fairly pleased with the results. I did think it was a bit heavy and was looking to repeat the build with some lighter weight wire until I came across this article from a well-known antenna buff, G3TXQ. It looked like just the ticket so I copied the design and low and behold after a few evening work I finished it off. Here it is during the tuning phase of work which I completed over the weekend (which by the way is as simple as tuning any dipole).

By the way the tropical weather (read blue sky) in St Bees is a welcome change from the recent flooding. I doubt it’ll last though!

You can see the usual antenna laying down in the background, which is a Hustler 6-BTV vertical which has suffered at the hands of the strong winds and salt air we get here. Once I had assembled both the antenna’s I was able to make a bit of a comparison between the two. The vertical is a good S point down on the Cobwebb on 20m, 17m and 15m and about the same on 12m and 10m (at that height!). To be fair it doesn’t have the 17m stub so that’s a bit of a poor comparison. I did managed to get it a little higher with the fishing pole but need to work on the mounting point and ‘environmental protection’ that it’ll need to be used here. Either that or it’ll go into the loft with the 40m dipole that’s up there at the moment.

For some reason I really enjoy these antennas, either to build or use but Michael, ZS1RJQ who I’m in regular contact with over email has built a fair few more than me. His are far more robust than mine but between us we’ve discussed the hardware side plenty of times and before long we’ll end up with an optimised lightweight design. This one is so far the most compact and well worth a tinker if you’re into that. Thanks to G3TXQ for the original design.

With Halloween coming up shortly maybe I’ll put a spider on it!