View Single Post
Old 11-19-2015, 09:53 AM   #19
gyropilot
Member in Training
 
Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: The Open Road
Posts: 4
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by ke0me View Post
I tried using a pizza pan (steel) with a mag mount ant.

seems like there just isn't enough metal there to work well as a ground plane.
While the ol' pizza pan trick works well for VHF/UHF, it's not nearly large enough for an HF antenna. The noise you heard was likely common mode RF current coming back down the coax as it (the coax) was forced to become the missing half of your antenna due to the lack of an adequate ground plane. This seems to be a typical problem when trying to cut corners with HF antennas.

Quote:
what would you think of attaching 4 radials, say about 16 Ft long to the pizza pan and mag mount?
At the RV park we're currently staying through the end of November, I really don't have room to run out ground radials. My nearest neighbor's RV is only 2.5' from mine on one side!

Around the beginning of December we'll begin boondocking for several months out in the desert north of Yuma at the BLM's Imperial Dam LTVA. Out there I'll have plenty of room to set up an HF antenna separately (away) from my travel trailer. On my short list for this is a Buddipole antenna system using a dipole for 10M or 20M and a vertical on the lower bands mounted on either 8' and/or 16' guyed masts. I'll also be able to run out ground plane radial wires without any problem.

After establishing a performance baseline using some of the Buddipole antennas erected away from our travel trailer, next I plan to experiment with some of the same antennas (particularly the verticals) mounted to our ladder of our travel trailer on top of a painter's pole. I'm going to experiment with draping the ground radials down and then around our travel trailer (maybe in a spiral fashion to contain the footprint) and see what happens to the antenna performance.

Quote:
PS - my first paying job was as a pizza maker for Shakey's Pizza Parlor (1968?) - so I can still make a pretty decent pie when needed.
I'm craving pizza just thinking about it!

73,

John
AA7US
gyropilot is offline   Reply With Quote