An Inverted Vee for 80 Meters with Integrated Tuning

Having an antenna that’s resonant across the entire 80-meter band is a challenge. Commercial antennas with integrated tuning units are expensive, but KA2C offers a compact and low-cost approach to “rolling your own” step-tuned 80-meter dipole or inverted vee.

NELSON SOLLENBERGER

Antennas for 80 meters rarely cover the full band with low SWR, including full-size dipoles, inverted vees, and verticals. Many solutions to this problem are used by hams, including desktop manual and automatic antenna tuners, remote antenna tuners, antenna broad-banding techniques such as cage dipoles, manual adjustments such as adding/removing pieces of wire to shift antenna resonance within the band, and other techniques. SWR and antenna efficiency/performance are not tightly coupled and good antenna performance with high SWR is possible, while poor antenna performance with low SWR is also possible. But low SWR (an impedance-matched system) can be important for safe and efficient operation of transmitters and amplifiers. Low SWR also minimizes coax cable transmission loss. For high power operation, a matched impedance system at 50 ohms results in operating…

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CQ Amateur Radio (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2023

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