Thursday 25 February 2010

Tak Tenna



I I I I I H Have been building a Tak Tenna with my good friend Frank MW1RES, it is an 80 meter version
and i believe one of the proto types.
Construction was fairly straight forward and we did get some help from Ian G0PLX when we were winding the coils, see the photo, Ian looks at the completed Tak Tenna and admires our handiwork :-)
Frank set the taps for the feed point as per the instructions but as the antenna was indoors it was not the best place to do this.
Later we put it on a 12 foot pole outside and did it again. The SWR was about just a shade under 2:1 and we could have got it much lower if we had carried on checking.
Frank then fed the Tak Tenna into his home made transmatch and the atu easily brought the swr down to 1:1. Then just for fun we tried other bands, leaving the taps where they were and with the transmatch we could get 1:1 on 40,30,20, 17 and 15 meters, we could also get a low swr on 12 and 10 but it was not as easy to tune.
I think for a small footprint and using an atu the Tak Tenna could prove very useful for some one who is short on space. Thanks for asking me to help Frank, enjoyed it very much.