Ham Radio: Your First HF Antenna

Great work TIM, keep going. 73 🖖🏽

Great video and great advice Tim!

Thanks for this latest video and noise level….what was this thing you can buy? Can I hold it next to the rig or do I need to go outside to measure the noise level…..and how will I pinpoint this noise…and how to deal with it.

Great advice Tim

I’m a M7, and I’ve strung up a cheap wire EFHW (with a 49:1) Unun. Limited to 10W, but managed to get a QSO into Brazil on 10M last week…. Was well chuffed

A great vid Tim and spot on with the advice. I was advised to buy a vertical for my first. I should have saved my money and experimented more. But it is all to do with learning about the hobby.

Hi Tim, great video and of course very useful info for many.
What do people say ,horses for courses, my 40m vertical has high noise, but it tx is outstanding, zl to eu every day, but my 40m dipole low to the ground is a great rx ant, no noise at all, so yes the rub is noisy vert but there will get you dx every time.
I never use multi band ant or ununs, I wanted to get the max out of one ant, hence my only 2 ant , verts for 40m and 20m, best bands overhaul I think.
But what do I know hi hi.
Take care my friend, zl3xdj

What a fantastic video, one could only wish the RSGB pick up this video and include it as part of the Foundation Training ! Given your technical experience and modelling, you know what you are talking about. I've been thru so many antennas it has cost me fortune and everything you say is absolutely spot-on, no regrets on my learning path, it makes me appreciate what I have now, but my word, wouldnt it be great to have this advice from the outset, would of saved me a load of money on antennas.

Good advice. Keep up the good work Tim. 73 Phil G0JBA

well done Tim, talking sense again, you won`t hear the stores say any of that, thanks for that chat texting the other day Tim.

Can't tell you how much I've learned from you. Many thanks. Truly! What are your thoughts on using RG-174 for POTA/SOTA applications? No longer than 25' to feed T2LT (which I learned from you), Hamstick vertical, and Hamstick horizontal dipole antennas. 10-40 meters.

Noise floor check advice strikes me as spot on, as well as the idea to look at the 9:1 unun… the non-resonant random wire really is a good option for a first-go… (these comments more for the readers, and @Kurt who asked about how to check the noise floor…) what you could do is have a ham come over, from your local club or whatever, and grab yourself an inexpensive shortwave radio that can tune single side band (SSB). It’ll have a telescopic metal whip on the radio. If you’re hearing a lot of stations as you tune around, then you’re probably ok on the noise floor. A local ham will have a better ear for what signal to noise ratio sounds like. You can also attempt to find an online sdr receiver in your vicinity (google free sdr or kiwi sdr), and see if you’re picking up locally some of those same stations. You should do this from the front/back yard/garden, or a balcony at worst, and not inside the house while using a handheld shortwave receiver. .. also for the 9:1, if you string it outside of a window like Walt K4OGO does when he’s working in Poland, you only need one support for your “random wire.” I have my 9:1 unun inside my 3rd floor apartment window with the antenna wire strung out to a tree through the closed aluminum-framed window, and it works surprisingly well. I have a 1lb weight tied to the end of the wire; so it’s literally strung over tree limbs. This allows the wire and counterweight to move and flex with the wind. And if I want to disconnect it, all I’d have to do is open the window and let the weight bring the far end of the wire back down to the ground. It’s quite surprising how forgiving something like going through an aluminum framed window can be, since it’s such a fraction of a wavelength of disturbance on a 49’ wire. No idea on insertion loss for the transformer… but something tells me that a good 9:1 may possibly be more efficient than some of the common designs for the 49:1. I’m using a match box by Nelson antennas on eBay, which people seem to be as happy with as the one that was shown on the video. Cheers and good luck all.

I did suffer lots of noise S/7 with 49.1 EFHW what I've made couple years ago the EFHW was by the bedroom window which is 2nd floor so I've moved it down to the the ground and 10 feet away from the house and it made a massive difference with S/3 noise am making more contact round the globel.

Good info there Tim 👌🏻😊…
Don’t forget my favourite…the good old Fan-Dipole 😉

I can vouch for a cobweb antenna. I do fairly well on 20m,17m, 15m, 24m & 10m with mine. The down side is that they can sometimes be a bit sensitive to conditions (sometimes the resonant frequency drops, causing an increase in SWR when there is rain water or ice on the wire elements). They can also be a slightly narrow-banded compared to some other antennas.

I cannot get both the data/CW & SSB sections of the 20m band. It is close enough to fix with the on-board tuner in the radio which is fine until you add a linear amplifier & need a low SWR to run the amp. Then you are either limiting the portion of the band that you can use to the SSB section, or adding an external high power tuner (which is expensive).

It's the same problem on 10m.

The other bands are much smaller & I can cover in their entirety with pretty good results.

Good advise! And get yourself a common mode choke when checking the noise floor and operating any antenna. Honestly, they should mandatorily sell one with every license exam. 😁

Tim as always 100% positive comments. You bring to the hobby a cool head with no steer of favour of commercial endorsement pressure hard sell. The honest truth all based on your experience. Your videos can put an old head on young shoulders provided those newer hobbyists are prepared to listen. Good work and can’t wait for the next instalment. Best 73’s G7LJL

Excellent advice as always Tim, and simply put. 73 M0FRH

Excellent advice Tim, I’ve wasted a small fortune on antenna’s. I think many of us go down the route of trying to work to many bands. Most work but aren’t comparable to mono-band imo.

Excellent point about the noise floor! I’m currently in the middle unit of a 6 unit apartment building. I’ve got an S4-S5 noise floor. But if I drive as little as 15m-18m away from the end unit, it drops to S1.
I love my old Kenwood “hybrids” but they don’t have the noise reduction of my FT891…and the 891 is how I know where the noise floor drops. So, it’s been 100% mobile operating for me. (If I have a lot of time, I take the big hybrids to a local park and run them off a battery powered DC->AC inverter.)

Hi Tim, yes much better DX now on 15, 12 & 10 meters. Fun times!
Regarding wire antennas - I have mixed feelings. I'm really grateful that I got to spend hundreds of hours playing around with wires, ununs, and poles, but now I'd only use them for experimental or portable use. The 24ft tall Hustler 6-BTV with 200 meters of ground radials is performing every bit as well as my 4010 EFHW / Spiderbeam 12HD inverted L. It's also outperforming my 72ft 9:1 inverted L on 80 meters data. I know it sounds crazy, but it's better on RX and TX!! Must be the radials? The only band that is mediocre (although I still worked Asiatic Russia on 50w SSB yesterday) is 10 meters, but my fibreglass CB antenna takes care of that - again, better than the 4010 EFHW / 12HD pole combo which is a blummin eyesore.
Anyway - hence the mixed feelings, cheers.