Attic Dipole Ladder Line

If you run an all band dipole with a tuner in the shack you need ladder line.

Attic dipole ladder line.

If you have an attic for example install the longest dipole you can and feed it with ladder line. Tie in attic or any available trees at your site. Well my 40m windom loads up very poorly on 80m and i m likely burning a good bit of my meager power heating the coax. Why use open wire feed line for a dipole instead of coax.

Mac af4ps fp 51 note. Paint or tape the white ladder line to coax transition fitting use cameo dacron for supports color white insulators tie supports to trees at least 20 above grounds people can t mess with learned this the hard way. It s easy to lose 75 of your power in your coax when operating on bands where the non resonant dipole presents a high feedpoint impedance to the feedline. Ladder line fed dipoles are ideal for attic use assuming that you can route the ladder line to your radio without too much metal contact.

The infamous attic dipole. 8 ft in the attic is plenty height for a good mobile screwdriver and if you have room for a dipole you should have room to staple down a decent amount of chicken wire for a counterpoise. Just make sure that both sides are equal. Let your antenna tuner worry about getting the best swr out of this system.

Ladder line fed dipole in attic some local qrp folks known as the knightlites meet regularly on 3 574mhz they meet on 80m so that nearby folks can participate via skywave effect of 80m. In the case of the ladder line dipole just make it as long as possible and stuff it into your attic any way you can. This was installed at a previous qth i will be the first or millionth remember i m from fl to affirm that the antenna is the determining factor for success when it comes to one s station set up. You mention a dipole and getting a balun if this is for a coax fed dipole unless its got traps or some other way to get multiple bands you only usually get about two bands out of a coax fed resonant dipole.

The better your antenna the more success you will have making contacts. With ladder line there is very little contact area between the spreaders and the conductors and when the other two type of loss are addressed can be an extremely low loss feed system. Posted by brian duerr wb2jix on 26th oct 2015. Don t worry about the length of your antenna.

If you run the ladder line through a metal box it will interact in some way.