Powerful radio

In fact a guy I knew who recently passed showed me his HAM rig. He had a 50' antenna in his back yard. With 5 watts he could hit repeaters 75 miles away. But with 75 watts, could only go out maybe 15 miles more. It's just the nature of the beast. The horizon kills the signal, period.

This was on 2 meters.

 

I’ve learned through out my years of being into CB radio’s (1980’s) a single phase coil antenna has worked the best. And I make sure the stinger is high enough to clear and high loads and trailers, usually over 13’8” and 14’ from the ground.

 

18”.

 

Those work well but if you're on a budget this is what I was talking about.

If you uncoil this thing its 102" long. So it kinda replicates one in performance.

 

Actually it will be physically longer than 102 inches. The shorter the antenna the longer the coil. But it's not in proportion to the physical height. The coil is always longer than you think it will be. One antenna that I built required over 9 ft of copper wire in the coil to build a 4 ft antenna so the overall length stretched out was about 13 ft

 

Then the SWR will be screwed up. The length has to be a certain amount or it won't be tuned correctly for that frequency. 102" is perfect. That's 1/4 wavelength of 11m which works out to 102 inches. You can't just arbitrarily make it longer or else it will be tuned for something other than 11m.

 

@rabbiporkchop is right about this one. The purpose of the coil is not to add physical length to the wire. The coiled wire acts as an inductor to make the physically short antenna look electrically longer. The actual length of wire needed for the coil will often be longer when stretched out than the 1/4 wave length. The shorter the antenna, the more coils (added inductance) you need to get the antenna electrically to 50ohms at the desired frequency, which is where you’ll have the best swr.

 

You must not build antennas and you're probably working upon some theory that you read in a book somewhere. There's a difference between electrical wavelength and physical wavelength

 

Ok. You a HAM radio operator? Whats your call sign?