Conditions

Tuesday, September 24, 2013

15 meter dipole.. not so good.

Hello again. Well I finally got to put up my 15 meter antenna last Sunday. A big disappointment! It didn't really work all that well. Just by accident I decided to see if it was something wrong with the antenna and swapped with my 40 meter dipole and guess what? The 40 meter dipole worked great. I was getting a very strong signal! Then after thinking about and doing some research, it turns out a 40 meter dipole will also work on 15 meters because it is a 3rd harmonic of 40 meters. So I have been able to use 15 meters all this time but didn't realize it.

Anyway, here is a picture of the antenna. I will probable replace it with a home brew bazooka later on. I have already bought the coax for it. You can actually see all six of my antennas in this picture. The vertical one is my Slim Jim 2 meter/75 centimeter antenna. That antenna works great!



Had a couple of CW contacts this weekend. One with Chris N3GBJ. Very nice guy and very supportive. He suggested that I try the CWops academy, so I signed up for the April/May class. Thanks Chris!

Also been doing some web design using a program called "Kompozer" . I am trying to get a web page started on qsl.net. More on that later.

All for now.