End Fed HF Antennas

[Chip Fetrow]

I ran an Inverted-L on HF as a Novice when I was in High School.  It had no ground other than the power ground rod — hey, I was a kid with no training — and it worked remarkably well, but it was all CW, and I worked my friends 15-20 miles away with a 75 Watt light bulb in my bedroom on the transmit side.  A real ground system would have made a real difference.

Since then, I have run shunt fed verticals and series fed verticals on MF with great success.  I once strung an Inverted-L as a temporary antenna for tower work at 5 kW just under 1 MHz.  It worked better than the main system.  The owner and GM of that station were freaked out by what I wanted to do, and burned up a lot of lawyer time.  Once it was on the air, they threw a party.  They didn’t want the tower work to end.  By the way, 5 kW is nothing.  Watch me draw an arc through my body.  10 kW is pretty much my limit for that, and I have done it.  50 kW scares the hell out of me.  I have a picture of me standing beside a series fed Blau-kNox diamond tower/antenna, about five feet away.  I was holding a NARDA RF exposure meter in my hand and it was going nuts.  I would have gone to within a foot of the tower, except that the ground screen was hard for me to stand on, and I really didn’t want to fall into the tower.  70 Amps — ouch.

So, what is the actual question?

—chip

On Sep 30, 2014, at 11:02 PM, tacos-request at amrad.org wrote:

> Message 1:
> Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2014 18:35:16 -0400
> From: R Cramer <rwcfl at tampabay.rr.com>
> To: Tacos List - AMRAD <tacos at amrad.org>
> Subject: End Fed HF Antennas
> 
> Does anyone have any practical experience with end fed HF antennas 
> capable of handling 200W PEP or there abouts.  Higher power labels is 
> also OK.
> 
> 73 from Hot and Humid Fl,
> Dick KY2E