Tag Archives: quarter wave

Quarter Wave -vs- 5/8ths Wave Vertical

q-wave-vs-5-8th-wave

Compare Red 5/8th -vs- Blue W/wave

Anyone who has mucked about with verticals will no doubt have worked out that a full-sized quarter-wave for the 40m band, more or less tunes up for 15m band.

It wasn’t until my entry in IOTA Contest this year that I convinced myself that they are not a cloudburner (as many people suggest) but compare favorably with a quarter-wave, even producing more gain by 2 dB at 10 degrees above the horizon.

OK, so 2 dB isn’t a huge gain, but hey – it’s free. Take it when you can!

Don’t forget, you can do the same for 10m band too by making an element 6.83m long and folding it back a further 1.11m (for 28.5 MHz). So you’ll need nearly 8m of wire. Don’t forget, that’s insulated wire!

40m Quarter Wave Vertical, Cornwall

40m vertical

Quarter Wave Vertical 9.6m in length

I’ve tried many verticals and never had good results APART from this one.

This is a 9.6m long fishing pole and the length of radiator is the same. I fixed 16 x 10m long radials to an insulator that I had lying around. I would have preferred this to have been aluminium but I already had three of these. Most of these bits were salvaged from the three-element vertical array with raised verticals that James and I made back in 2009. Each bolt was bonded together with some copper wire that is out of shot, underneath the insulator and the radials were politely scattered in an approximate radial system on the ground. SWR is 1.0:1 according to my electronic controller on the Acom 2000.

The results have been amazing but I do realise that I had two things on my side; location by the sea and almost no electrical noise. Bliss.

As I write this, I’ve worked 48 DX entities over about 7 hours operating time on 40m. Quite incredible. I’m a convert.