{"id":7711,"date":"2010-01-06T05:44:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-05T18:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2010\/01\/06\/new-antenna-for-the-hw-8-station\/"},"modified":"2025-07-21T23:22:25","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T13:22:25","slug":"new-antenna-for-the-hw-8-station","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/2010\/01\/06\/new-antenna-for-the-hw-8-station\/","title":{"rendered":"New antenna for the HW 8 station"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Now that my HW 8 station has been moved indoors (good thing — there was snow on the hilltops this week!) I had to put up a new antenna. I decided to go with the same design that I had earlier: a dipole fed with TV twin-lead. I knew I needed a bit more wire than I had used in the original — I had trouble getting that antenna to tune up on 80. So I went to the local hardware store and asked for 20 meters of AC line cord. That cost me 8 Euros. Not bad.<\/span>
We had a nice sunny afternoon on Sunday — Billy and I took the line cord out into the olive grove and pulled apart the two wires. (Hint: Start from the center, and pull slowly, or else the cord will get all twisted and a two minute job will turn into a twenty minute exercise in untangling.) I got to use some of those Radio Shack “solder strips” — I just wrapped a few around the connection points and applied heat from a cigarette lighter.<\/span>
I put some parachute cord (550 cord) over a conveniently placed tree branch using the venerable rock and rope method. One throw was all that it took. The radio gods were smiling on this project.<\/span>
Success! With the Trastevere flea market Pi network, the thing tunes up nicely on 80, 40, 20, and 15. I notice that the cheap CB SWR meter that also I picked up at the flea market doesn’t seem to sample much RF at 80 meters. I’m guessing that the designers were very focused on 27 MHz.<\/span>
I quickly worked stations all over Europe, and even worked one station in Israel. I worked G4OEC in Somerset — I immediately thought of Tim Walford, and asked OM OEC if he knew the wizard of the Somerset farm. Mac said his village was far from Tim’s QTH.<\/span>
It is nice to once again get familiar with the daily routine of the bands. 80 is hopping when I turn the rig on at 6 am local time. 40 seems to be active too. 20 opens a bit later, and I can hear stateside stations starting around noon local time. I really like hearing KZ1H up there in the high end of the 20 meter band — I can hear him almost every day.<\/span>
Check out the ad for the HW 8 in a 1978 catalog. This must be a non-U.S. catalog because the ad brags of the HW-8’s ability to “work the States.”<\/span>
Not much astronomy this weekend — Sabina and most of the rest of Italy fell under clouds on Sunday night. But I did catch a glimpse of Capella and the Kids.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now that my HW 8 station has been moved indoors (good thing — there was snow on the hilltops this week!) I had to put up a new antenna. I decided to go with the same design that I had earlier: a dipole fed with TV twin-lead. I knew I needed a bit more wire … Continue reading “New antenna for the HW 8 station”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7711","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-antennas","category-hw-8"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7711","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7711"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7711\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7713,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7711\/revisions\/7713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7711"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7711"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7711"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}