What a difference a day makes!

Last night after my post I was reading a few articles about BTV tuning, but N8ITF’s site happened to shed some light on why I couldn’t resonate the antenna inside of the amatuer bands properly. This morning I decided on a last-ditch effort to finally get this antenna tuned by adjusting all of the traps, something WB2WIK (a relative pro with these antennas) doesn’t recommend doing unless there is something majorly wrong. How wrong can an antenna be out of the box? Apparently alot! Using my MFJ Antenna Analyzer, I was able to pull down the traps for the following SWR’s:

40m – from 3.5 to 1.5
20m – from 1.9 to 1.1
15m – from 2.6 to 1.3
10m – from 1.3 to 1.2

Later today my DX Engineering radial plate and tilt over base arrived of which allowed me to properly terminate the radial field to the antenna. Here’s a shot of me performing the installation. In the foreground is an RF choke I made with some RG58 I had available. Tomorrow I’ll have to retune 20m and up as the height of the antenna above ground has changed by a few inches.

I’m thinking I can pull 40m down even more by chopping about 2 inches off the 40m portion of the antenna.

Today I was able to work F6HKA in France and got a 57 signal report. I also was able to reach J79XBI in Dominica, both at 100 watts.