Invertd L W3DZZ 40/80 and Top Band Antenna

The W3DZZ Top band Inverted L is a great antenna if you want to get on top band but never thought it possible because you are limited to a small garden. It doesn’t have to be in a straight line, you can bend to your garden shape and it should still work pretty well.

The lengths are divided up in to 9.9 metres followed by the 7MHz trap and then 6.55 metres to the 3.5MHz trap and then another 8.54 metres. A good earth is needed with a ground rod, but preferably some ground radials would be even better.

As usual the higher the better for the antenna, but it will work at 15 or 20 feet if limited with height.

The traps are the simple coax fed, divided up to 20 turns for the 80 meter and 11 turns for the 40 meter on a 40 mm PVC water pipe former with simple solder connections as shown in the diagram.

Below are my traps which took about an hour to build.

Forty

Eighty

The top band length shown will give a 1:5:1 SWR at around 1.9MHz. If you are limited with height try to put in more ground radials if you can.

The picture below shows it going over original designer’s house, but as I said before you can bend it to how you want. I’m lucky enough to have it as a straight dipole, but last year I had it up as a horizontal L shape round the corner of the garden and it worked well.

Do experiment with this antenna, especially now it's summer and you can get it ready for those dark nights when top band and eighty start coming in to their own. Once set up correctly to your particular situation it will work really well for those lower bands!

Forgive the quality of the camera work, but hopefully you get the idea with the  W3DZZ  about 10 meters up!

This shows where the coax is split to the shack and the earth goes to the ground radials from the DX Commander

DX Commander & Rebuilding W3DZZ Top Bander

I don't know if you have come across this antenna before but information is widely available on the internet. Which is where I first saw it and then came across the youtube site of DX Commander. Cullum is a bit of an odd ball to say the least, but is very entertaining and knowledgeable about his product. So much so that he convinced me and having read the various favourable comments as well, I ordered the DX Commander Classic multi band antenna.

 Basically it's a vertical 10 metre fibre glass pole with a number of elements in parallel attached to it , in turn you connect the elements up to a number of ground plane radials by a series of aluminium plates. Very neat and tidy but simple, but then all the best ideas seem to be simple and it works very well. I have to say I'm pretty impressed and with the price. It's now raised up in my paddock and within a few days of erecting I've had contacts from all over Europe, across the pond and in to the far reaches of Russia. By the time the cycle picks up I'll have no problems getting VK and ZL.

I now have the W3DZZ up for 40 and 80 meters, the Hustler which is a sort of back up antenna which is the 6 bander and now the DX Commander which is setup for 10, 12, 14 and 30 meters. Regular readers will probably remember me mentioning the W3DZZ sister antenna (40, 80 and top band) that I experimented with back last year. Well I am in the process of rebuilding, I am using the two old coaxial traps (80 and (40) which I have reset and cleaned up and am just waiting for the new wiring for the element.

The whole length of the antenna is roughly 25 metres but obviously split up with the traps. I hope to use the ground radials from the DX Commander with the top band antenna and I'll stretch it out across my paddock. I've already setup and prepared some poles for the antenna to hang, so now it's just waiting for the postal service to drop the wiring off!



The picture above shows how it would be set up over a house, but I plan to have it raised up, but in my paddock. The picture below shows my previous attempt and how simple it is when completed. I think where I went wrong last time was that I didn't really plan how I was going to raise and keep up 25 metres of wire and two traps. It was always a bit fragile, it never felt solid, also the tuning could have been better. So this time I'll take my time and do things slowly!

Radio wise I still have the FTDX 5000MP and the FT 1000D as back up and of course the trusty K2 and a number of QRP rigs. Sometimes I get itchy and want to sell and buy, but in honesty the 5000 and the 1000 are superb rigs and really why bother?