I’ve been investigating putting some antennas outside and not getting very far. So I got a 2m ‘big wheel’ antenna off a trader on eBay. Plan A was to build my own but, being lazy I purchased a Wimo one. I’ve just installed this in the loft, directly above the shack so no issues of distancing (!) and it is a lot bigger than I had pictured. I now need to crawl under the thing to get to the fan dipole and other less important things such as the plumbing feeding the shower… hmmm.
Anyway, it all went together without much struggle and the NanoVNA shows a decent low SWR across the 2m band. I’ve had to rearrange stuff so the 4m dipole is now where the 2m one was and had to be rotated 90 degrees so is now roughly north-south.
Initial PSK Reporter results from the big wheel – note both the 2 and 4m antennas are fed from transverters from the transverter store in the Ukraine – showed 2m FT8 results of -14db into Cornwall and -10db into Cork plus a decent spread, and 4m picked up in south Wales so no worse than before. Of course, all these reports will probably be from stations with far better antennas than me, but hey.
The next task is to build a halo for 4m. I have some metal on order for that and other projects, like a 4m ground plane so I can do vertical as well as horizontal.
All still in the loft of course. One day these will be outside getting wet…