Very intreasting title about ham radio goes here?

Calling all cybernauts, spacers, and cyborgs!

This is another update about ham radio and the things I'm working on.
Beware, this is gonna be a long read!

Okay, first to start off, I am currently enjoying my week-long break from learning the pains of software development and networking, which at times makes me scream at my computer. Like every tech support person secretly does.

So this week I decided to try to enjoy my time off from college and play some radio.

For about 3–4 months I have been playing with dipoles. The idea originally came from a contact on 15 meters, where I talked with a nice man about antennas and setups. At one point I talked about ham fests and wanting to get a band-pass filter, hoping it would fix my S5 noise floor. The man said to build a dipole; it's a lot quieter. At first I thought it was gonna be one of those elitist, ideological copes. Like, "yeah, I only buy a Toyota because it's Japanese," even though other countries also make very competitive vehicles. But I digress, so I thought, well, it's super cheap to make, so I might as well try it. After considering doing a POTA with an end-fed vertical with 16 radials made me hesitant to take it to a park. Basically, to describe it for readers who aren't engrossed in antenna building: a dipole has a feed point pretty close to 50 ohms, and has two wires or elements of equal length, each commonly 1/4 of the wavelength, and in total equals a half wave.

An end-fed, as it's referred to, is fed through the end with a high-impedance transformer, at minimum a 9:1 and maximum a 49:1. In theory, this means that you will hear a lot more electrical noise and need a good counterpoise, which acts as a return path for RF. So to put it simply, an end-fed is half an antenna, and you gotta BYOGP (bring your own ground plane). To complete the antenna, without a ground plane it can cause RFI, using your feed-line or you as a return path.

So I built a dipole, and WOW, it's so much quieter!

The big downside of a dipole is that it's usually for a single band.

Now there are modified dipoles, like a fan dipole.
The concept is very simple, but has many leads all coming from one feed point, allowing multi-band operation.
The big downside I learned is that it uses a lot of wire and becomes very tedious to pack up.

Insert my new obsession!

The linked dipole!

Basically, you have a wavelength, let's say 10 meters, and you have a connector at the end. You then connect some more wire, and the 10-meter is now a 12-meter.
Don't want 12? Just unplug that segment!
It's still a mono-bander, but that's okay for me. The JPC-12 I previously had needed a whip adjusted each time you wanted to change bands, which, in my personal opinion, made it so tedious to change bands.

So insert today!

I woke up early and continued working on my linked dipole.
I had 2m, 6m, 10m, 12, and 15m.
So I tried making a 17-meter link, but made it waaaay too short, and ended up taking a break.

I went inside and got my 891 and hooked it up to my linked dipole. The day before, when I made the 12m and 15m link, I tried a few QSOs with my G106 5-watt HF radio, and I never got picked up. So I decided today I'm gonna put 100 watts into my new antenna.

AND MAAAAAN, TODAY WAS AMAZING!!!

Throughout the day I procrastinated adding 17 and 20 meters, because for some reason a lot of the WARC and 10 meters were OPEN!
I made contact with Lithuania on 15 meters, England on 10 meters, and California as well on 10!
I was utterly amazing — I got a 5–8 in England on 10 meters. Utterly insane, my dipole sent a signal all the way across the ocean at 15 feet above the ground in an inverted-V orientation.

So the end of the day was rapidly approaching, and I decided to scroll through the bands to see if there were any stations.

I found W1KBN, Massachusetts University, calling CQ. I JUST HAD TO MAKE A CONTACT. It's so exciting to me to hear other people around my age calling CQ!

So I quickly said, "screw 17, I'll build my own 17 with blackjack and hookers."
Promptly making a 20-meter extension and catching the tail end of the station calling CQ.

It was such a fun contact!!!

And I'm now working on building and refining a linked dipole design.

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