Hi to all.

Regarding using the G5RV antennas on 160 meters, at my old QTH, I did use a
G5RV-type of antenna that was a scaled up version of the common 102 ft.
variety.  It loaded on 160m through 6 m, although performance on 10 meters
seemed pretty poor, even though it loaded okay.  Signal levels wer down
significantly on both receive and transmit on 10 meters, with respect to
the other antenna system that I had there--a system that was made of a 75
meter inverted vee set perpendicular to a 40 meter inverted vee and fed
with a single coax for both vees.  This antenna tied on leg of the 40 meter
vee and one leg of the 75 meter vee to the center conductor of the coax
while the other leg of the 40 meter vee and the other leg of the 75 meter
vee was tied to the braid of the coax.  With the auto tuner in my Kenwood
TS-690S, I could load this antenna everywhere from 80m through 10m, and 6
meters would load with no tuner with about a 1.4 to 1 SWR.  I cut the
resonant frequences for about 3820 kHz, and about 7100, and the antenna
played great across the HF bands.  It was heads and shoulders above my
double scaled G5RV on 10 meters.  Both antennas were at about the 38 ft.
level.  I wish I had that much property now as these antennas played very
well, and were fairly easy to make.

That reminds me of one humorous story.  The first year that I had the
inverted vees up, we had a major ice storm that brought trees down, did a
fair amount of damage to the house, and of course damaged the mast for my
inverted vee antennas.  Well, in true amateur spirit, I was up on top of
the barn putting the antennas back together again, even if it was a cob
together job on the following Saturday.  Our church secretary saw me up
there and had a fit to think of a blind man climbing around on a barn roof
putting antennas back up.  She called up a family member up and complained,
but I pretty much looked upon it as if I don't go out and put it up, no one
else is going to.

Anyway, I lived with my cob together job a bit longer than I should have,
and about the middle of December of the following year, the mechanical
splice that I made developed enough corrosion that the connection was no
longer reliable, and with each wind gust, I could see my SWR jump.  I
called a friend and fellow ham who had moved to a house that was a little
over a mile away, and asked if I could borrow his butane fired soldering
iron to resolder the connection.  He came down to the house, and we hauld
the antenna down and cleaned up the wire.  But, when we tried to solder the
wire, every time we would try to solder it, the wind would blow the butane
soldering iron out.  So, there were the two of us, up on the barn roof,
trying to figure out how we were going to solder a connection that was in a
location where we couldn't get electricity to use a conventional soldering
gun.  My solution was to crouch up wind from him, and spread my coat open
as wide as I could to block the wind so that he could solder the
connection.  Welol, as you might guess, that same church secretary was
going down the road and almost drove off of it!  She later said that it
looked like I was getting ready to fly south for the winter!  It's too bad
we didn't have someone with a camera to take a picture of it for QST.

Anyway, for the fellow who was asking about adding more wire to load it on
160 meters, let me assure you that you most assuredly can, and it does
work.  I used an LDG Electronics AT-11 auto tuner to get the antenna to
load on 160 meters, as the Kenwood AT-450 (the auto tuner used in the
TS-690S) does not cover 160 meters.  I had generally good results on all
bands except 10 meters.

73, de Lou K2LKK



Louis Kim Kline
A.R.S. K2LKK
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Work Telephone:  (585) 697-5753