g7kse.co.uk » 50Mhz

50Mhz Vertical Antenna

Alex — Tue, 31 May 2011 14:11:41 +0000

With an armful of redundant wire from a previous job (Most of it either 12 or 16AWG) I set about creating a 5/8 50Mhz vertical antenna. The idea was to make a wire version of the G3JVL antenna as featured on the UKSMG website. All the parts came out of the scrap bins at work one lunchtime with the exception of the bolts. Only the hole saw and drill had to be borrowed.

The instructions are fairly self explanatory and it shouldn’t be hard to follow, or so I thought. As with most of the designs on the internet I found that there wasn’t much to back up the picture should anything not give the results you were looking for. Would you believe it but mine just doesn’t want to be resonant at 50Mhz, 40 yes or maybe 41Mhz but 50Mhz? Not today, or tomorrow for that matter. So its to the scrap bin again to find out the problem. I suspect its down to the coil.

I knocked together a wound coil which I can tap at any of the whole coils, wound round a piece of ~20mm OD PVC pipe. I will use this to see if I can get the beasty to be resonant on 50Mhz or thereabouts by changing the tapping point. If it all went to plan then it wouldn’t be any fun right?

50Mhz better with a yagi

Alex — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 11:17:10 +0000

Although I’m a sporadic radio user I’ve had a lot of assignments to do recently and that has meant that I inadvertantly turn on the rig by accident
The upside is that I’ve had a laod of QSO’s with EA stations recently with the furthest being in the canaries. I can safely say that the yagi has been a worthwhile investment

6m back in business

Alex — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 12:16:48 +0000

50mhz is just one of those ‘get it or forget it’ bands. Either you love it or just can’t be bothered with it. A while ago i bought a 5 ele yagi from trident to try my luck and then promptly moved house. The result was that the antenna sat in my garage for a couple of years and I didn’t get a chance to use it. This weekend I had a few spare minutes and rigged it up on my decking so that it was blocked in just about every direction but southwest through to north west.

After some scanning through the band I cam across a few EA stations and fired through a few responses as they were a strong 59. EA1GE responded and my 6m career spluttered back into life. A good 1000 miles with a lashed together set up gave me a smile and although short lived the Es also allowed a good 59 on the CS5BLA beacon.