My current antenna is the B.A.L. -- a large, horizontal loop that's about 150 meters of wire about 15-20 meters up in the trees around the yard. I think it's a great all band antenna.
I buried a couple of coax runs from the shack wall to a spot about 15m away behind a large bush. The ladder line from the loop falls down to this spot so I do not have wires directly hanging off the house (which makes the YL happy). I was using a
DX Engineering MAXI-CORE Balun and was happy with the results. (As an aside:
I love hamfests! I picked up this used balun for a song.) I used this setup for a few years and have been pretty happy with the results.
Since the loop is a non-resonant antenna, the SWR can be high. I've been using the tuners built into my transceivers (Elecraft K2 & K3) but have been
concerned about loss in the coax. Since I only run 100 watts or less, I want every bit of power to get to the antenna and not be used to heat the coax. Placing a tuner at the end of the
coax run is supposed to reduce the
coax loss. I had always planned on adding a remote tuner when the budget allowed. When I buried the coax, I also threw in a couple of runs of CAT-5 cable that I had laying around for use for some sort of remote control.
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| The remote connection at the end of the coax run |
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I recently acquired an
Icom AH-4 remote antenna tuner. I am using one of the CAT-5 runs as the control cable for the AH-4; I simply used each twisted pair together for the power and control signals. I no longer use the balun.
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| All connected and ready to go! |
Since I am using this tuner with a non-Icom radio, I needed a way to
tell the tuner to initiate the tune cycle. I whipped up the circuit described as the
universal controller
and it seems to do the job. (Edit Jan 2019: The link to the universal controller diagram
http://www.k2.dion.ne.jp/%7Esradio/AH-4En.htm no longer works! There is a
discussion on eham with a diagram that I think is similar.) I do plan on building a better controller
that will initiate the tune cycle and then key the radio automatically.
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| The 'controller' in the shack |
I've been very happy with the tuner so far. It finds a decent match (less then 1.5:1) on all bands and I believe it has made a difference. I don't have empirical evidence to support that, though! At least I no longer worry about loss in the coax...
