Tag: antennas
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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.…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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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Ham Radio Cheat Sheet: Q Codes, Band Plan, Phonetics & Antenna Lengths
Every ham radio cheat sheet you need in one place: Q codes, the ARRL band plan for Technician, General, and Extra, the phonetic alphabet, and EFHW and random wire antenna lengths for HF.
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Building a 49:1 Transformer for a 40m End-Fed Half-Wave Antenna
The end-fed half-wave presents a nasty impedance to match. Here’s how to wind the 49:1 transformer that tames it, and build the 40m wire to go with it.
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Ground Plane Verticals for 2m and 70cm: A Simple Build
A quarter-wave ground plane vertical is the simplest antenna you can build for VHF and UHF, just one radiating element and a set of radials off a connector. Here is how to put one together.