Revamping the Carolina Windom 80 Special

A couple of years ago I had played about with my old Carolina Windom 80 special  by reducing its size to the 40 Windom, but I soon realised when testing that the balun was individually set for a Carolina 80 special and so I had to revert back to its original size to make it work. The problem was I originally reduced the size because I didn’t have the length of land required for it to fit! So the Carolina 40 was put away in the shed until I could find time to re-build and figure out a way for it to fit in my garden!

 

The 40 I had made from the original Carolina Windom 80 special

 

The length of antenna issue had been sorted by having the good fortune to purchase a bit more land off the farmer, as it had come up for sale just at the right time, not just for an antenna farm I hasten to add, but for increasing the size of our plot with a mini paddock to do with what we liked and it just happened that a Carolina Windom 80 special happened to fit snugly in the paddock!

The forty being 66 feet in length (41ft and 25ft split), needed to revert back to the original size of 133 feet, 83 feet on one side and 50 feet the other. All I did was increase the length of each side by soldering new pieces of 42 stranded cable wire, nothing else was touched. Now I had to hope that the balun and transformer (1:1 balun) would still be working even though I had been messing about with them and 22 foot coax was now totally new!

I took my old fibre glass 20 foot slotted mast and I increased it in size by 10 feet with some specially strengthened plumbing tubing slotted together so that the 22 foot coax cabling with transformer would hang freely.

I re-measured the actual antenna wire lengths to confirm I now had 83 and 50 feet, did some simple soldering to the 4:1 balun to strengthen and stiffen it and hoisted up to 30 odd feet to do SWR tests, thinking that it probably wouldn’t work but I had some fun doing the build process.

Initial tests were quite good except with the 40 meter band were the average SWR was about 2.0 but even so I could just about use with a tuner.

80 MHz                 1.4 – 1.8 across the band

40 MHz                 1.8 – 2.0 across the band

20 MHz                 1.3 – 1.5 across the band

15 MHz                 1.4 – 1.6 across the band

10 MHz                 1.7 – 1.9 across the band             

Being pleasantly surprised by the outcome and comparing against the Cobweb and Hustler it’s not a bad antenna for a multi bander and of course it does state that you have to use with a good tuner.

Over the next few weeks I will try to make a few improvements here and there. But all things considered I’m quite pleased with my semi homebrew antenna!