Chapter 5

12 April 2006

The weather held. My new parallel dipole is up! I have a voice on 75m. I'm not very loud, but I'm getting into Maine, so something's going right.

The dipole is only about 30' up. That means my 75m signal is NVIS (Near-Vertical Incidence Skywave), but I'm getting out to the Mid-Atlantic and New England. Good enough for now.

For some reason, 20m isn't working worth a damn. For the life of me, I cannot figure out why. I've pulled the antenna down and trimmed it - mathematically, it was about four inches too long, I discovered - with no effect. Oh, well. That's leaves another antenna project in my future. In the meantime, I can use 75.