Tag: dipole

  • 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…

  • The CaHR Hydra: From Backyard Tests to a Mountain Overnight

    It performed well in the backyard as a dipole and a vertical, but it wasn’t until an overnight mountain trip that this antenna really won me over.

  • Full-Size Wire Loop Antennas: Delta and Horizontal Loops for HF

    I’ve written about magnetic loops for tight spaces, but full-size wire loops are a completely different animal and they deserve their own writeup. A full-wave loop is simply a wire, roughly one wavelength long on your target band, formed into a closed shape and fed at one point. No magic, just a different geometry than…

  • Permanent Wire Antenna Installs: Lessons From My Backyard

    Everything I built for portable use eventually taught me something different once I tried to leave it up permanently. Here is what actually held up in my own backyard, and what I would do differently.

  • How to Build a Wire Dipole Antenna for HF on a Budget

    A simple, cheap half-wave dipole is still one of the best-performing HF antennas you can build. Here’s how to cut, build, and tune one for under $30.

  • Off-Center-Fed Dipoles: What They Trade Off Versus a Center-Fed Dipole

    Moving the feedpoint off center turns a simple dipole into a multi-band antenna, at the cost of a genuinely awkward impedance and some real compromises. Here is how that trade actually plays out.

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