Thursday, December 15, 2011

The Good Old W3DZZ and the Tokyo ATU

The weather this week has been horrid, mostly gales and rain, consequently the cobweb has been lowered right down and the moxon placed to one side via the tilt mast.

The only antenna in operation at the moment is the W3DZZ which is doing a sterling job as it’s taking a real hammering from these storms and gales we've been recently suffering from. 

It's one of the first antennas I ever built and was taken from a brilliant article I read by GM0OMX Len Paget which is so easy to follow that it made me realise that I could become an antenna builder. Strangley enough by shear chance our paths crossed via email and I told him how his article had inspired me to take up antenna building. He wrote me a wonderful reply and told me that the article was a "rush job" sent in to Practical Wireless at the very last minute. How disastrous would that have been for me if he had missed the deadline!!

The W3DZZ has always proved to be invaluable and more importantly in bad weather such as the stuff we are having this week utterly reliable. Although not designed as an all bander (the traps are set for 40 and 80 meters), I have it connected up through the Tokyo ATU and I  can happily tune up 30 and 20 meters and have this week successfully had a couple of qso’s on each band.

Tokyo Hy-Power HC-400 ATU

The Tokyo Hy-Power HC-400 ATU was picked up via Ebay many moons ago and is one of the most useful bits of kit I own. That ATU will tune up a piece of wet string and if you ever see one for sale my advice is go buy it!
Sometimes I'll turn off the auto ATU in the FT1000 MP V and just use the Tokyo, it's that simple to set up.

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