Spring approaches and one's thoughts turn toward...

Antennas. Antennas with better gain. Antennas for the longer bands...

Hmm... I know can do better than that G5RV I put up in the backyard last year. But with what? Sure, the antenna drops a signal nicely into Europe and Central America on 20m but it's poop on 40 and 80 meters. Ok, it is an instructive first antenna - I've learned a lot - but not much better than a NVIS antenna for DX on those longer bands (For sure, it is the very model of a somewhat short, NVIS antenna on 80m).

A tower would be nice but the location for its base is currently filled with a 45 year-old oak. It is a huge tree that in a 'good' year drops around 50 kg of acorns (good for the squirrels at least) and about 25 bags of leaves (I do these sums while raking. I takes my mind off the hours of yard work in the fall). This tree also sits where my garage should rightfully be, and will be someday, I hope. There's a lot of firewood potential in that oak, too. Unfortunately, all those plans are on hold until the tree succumbs to natural causes or someone else in our house changes their mind. Oh, damn it, I will admit it's a beautiful tree. A gorgeous tree that is also promoting moss growth and the accelerated aging of the shingles on my roof. It is an obscenely healthy tree, too, with no wilt, no blight, and simply no disease that would otherwise induce an arborist to pull on the start cord of their chainsaw.

Life is not too short for QRP but it definitely is too short to wait for middle-aged oaks to keel over.

Meanwhile, what to do with wires alone and no significant tree branches more than maybe 14 meters (~45 feet) above the ground? A dipole cut for 40m? A wire vertical, maybe with a capacitive top-hat and elevated radials? That would be a quarter-wave on 40m and I could use spreaders to create a 'cage' of wires to 'thicken' the vertical part for more bandwidth. I'd be willing to play with a relay and a coil at the feed to operate on more than one band. Or a SteppIR vertical instead? The BiggIR could be easily elevated by rope. What else? In the shorter bands, I could probably string a 2-element quad for 6- and 10-meters in the trees and rotate the array with a rope to point the antenna where I wanted.

VE7CA designed an intriguing set of 2-element, multiband wire yagis that operate up to the 40m band. These were described as portable antennas in the 2006 ARRL Antenna book but they look like they could be robustly made and held in tighter position with a few extra ropes. Even if the antennas fail after a bad winter, wire is relatively cheap. I was thinking about making one of these yagis for our club's Field Day. I wonder who else might have tried these?

www.shelbrook.com/~ve7ca/AntWYa.htm

So many choices: It's almost paralyzing. Coated wire for a loop antenna strung through branches along one edge, stranded wire for a quad or stretched-frame VE7CA yagi and solid wire for a sturdy dipole or vertical? I'd better cover all the likely options with a big order to The Wireman. And it's time to shoot some rope supports over the choice branches in the trees before the leaves come out.