Category: Antennas

  • Installing a Coax Feedthrough Panel for Your Shack Wall

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Every antenna feedline has to get from outside to your radio somehow, and a proper feedthrough panel is a small project that solves weatherproofing, grounding, and cable management problems all at once, compared to routing coax through a cracked window or a hastily drilled hole.…

  • Antenna Height: How Much Does It Actually Matter

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Every ham has heard “get it up in the air” as antenna advice, and it is generally true, but the relationship between height and performance is more nuanced than just higher equals better, especially once you factor in what you are actually trying to work.…

  • Ladder Line and Open-Wire Feedline: When Balanced Beats Coax

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Coax dominates modern ham radio for good reason, but ladder line and open-wire feedline have not disappeared, and for a specific kind of multi-band wire antenna, they still solve a problem coax genuinely struggles with. Why Ladder Line Loses So Little Ladder line’s two parallel…

  • Center-Fed vs End-Fed: Choosing Your Antenna’s Feed Point

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Where you feed a wire antenna, at the center or at one end, changes more than just how you hang the wire. It affects impedance, installation flexibility, and even how forgiving the antenna is about your specific yard. Center-Fed: The Classic Dipole Approach A center-fed…

  • Roof-Mounted vs Ground-Mounted Verticals: Tradeoffs You Don’t See Coming

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Mounting a vertical antenna on a roof instead of at ground level solves some real problems and creates a few new ones that do not show up until you are actually up there installing it. Why People Roof-Mount in the First Place Small lots, HOA…

  • Field-Expedient Antennas: Improvising When You Forgot Your Gear

    You forgot the antenna. Here is what you can actually improvise with what is already in the car.

  • Tower and Mast Permitting: Navigating Local Zoning Beyond PRB-1

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. I have written before about what PRB-1 is and what it actually protects. This post is about the part that comes after you understand PRB-1: the real, practical process of getting a tower or tall mast permitted with your local jurisdiction, which is a very…

  • Vertical vs Yagi vs Wire for DX: A Decision Framework

    Part of our Building Your First Ham Radio Station guide. Every antenna thread on every ham radio forum eventually turns into an argument about which is best for DX, and the honest answer is that all three of these can work DX, and all three have real tradeoffs. I want to walk through how I…

  • The Yaesu FC-80 Tuner for the FTX-1 Field: Does What It Says

    My take on the Yaesu FC-80 automatic tuner for the FTX-1 Field Head. It’s not a G90-level internal tuner, but for a 3:1 mismatch it performs quite nicely.

  • Pairing the FTX-1 with the Spooltenna Ultra for Portable HF

    Why the Spooltenna Ultra is my default antenna for the FTX-1 in the field, and how I actually deploy and tune the pairing.

  • Getting the Most from the FTX-1’s Internal Antenna Tuner

    How the FTX-1’s automatic tuner actually behaves, what it can and can’t fix, and how I get the fastest, cleanest matches out of it.

  • Magnetic Loop Antennas: The HOA-Proof HF Antenna

    Why a magnetic loop might be the only real HF option for balconies, apartments, and HOA lots that stealth wire antennas can’t get past.

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