By Jim Streible, K4DLI SK
There were many new and somewhat unfamiliar antennas used at this year’s NFARL Field Day. One of these was the one for the CW station. This antenna is basically two 5/8 wave antennas end to end. It can be fed with ladder line from the center insulator to tuner or it can use an impedance transforming length of ladder line to take the impedance to 50 ohms and fed from there to the rig with 50 ohm coax. That would limit it use (without a tuner) to a single band – 40 meters. To make it an efficient antenna system on multiple bands, ladder line to a balanced tuner should be used and this was the configuration at the 2009 NFARL FD. Shown in the paper are the plots and impedance calculations for all bands from 160 thru 6 meters. More ...