Over the last few weeks, I’ve made significant changes to my station. I found an IC-7000 locally, at a very fair price. It’s an amazing little radio and does what had taken many pieces of equipment to accomplish previously. With the 7000 coming into the shack, I sold off much of the gear that I had been using for HF/VHF.
Out With the Old (more…)
Though I have had great success with my simple attic mounted 20m dipole fed with a balun and ladder line, I’ve been looking for a new antenna to expand my operating capabilities. Specifically, I wanted something to add 40m and 80m, and possibly even 160. I was so impressed with the quality and performance of my DX-20 dipole that I decided to keep it in the family and go with the Alpha Delta DX-LB Plus.
The DX-LB covers 160-80-40 meters with an overall length of only 100 ft. Typical 2:1 VSWR bandwidth is as follows: 160M – 20kHz • 80M – 40 kHz • 40M – 300 kHz
Obviously that’s pretty narrow on 80m and very narrow on 160m, but my tuner will broaden those out considerably.
So that’s the DX-LB part of the name. The Plus is the addition of parallel wires for 20m and 10m. Though I already have coverage on 20m and 10m (and 15m which the DX-LB Plus gives you from the 40m section) my installation will be drastically different. I plan to keep my existing dipole installed, not only for coverage on 17m and 12m, but also to operate during more extreme weather, and to compare reception between the two. The new antenna will be oriented to face slightly south of my current dipole orientation.
The plan for this antenna is to (more…)
Ever since I upgraded to General, I’ve been eager to get on HF. After Christmas I started to get serious about acquiring the necessary building blocks. I had been deciding between a used, mid-range Icom like the IC-736, or a new IC-718 which is the current basic model available. In the end, I decided to split the difference when a slightly used IC-718 was offered online. That radio included a few accessories, including (more…)
Radio Returns 