Packtenna Dayton Update 1.0

Hi everyone,

This year PackTenna will be at the Dayton Hamvention. We will be in booth BA406. Please stop by and see us. This year we will be sharing our booth with our great friends from the Fo Time Podcast.

Jeremy KF7IJZ and I will be in the booth doing interviews for the podcast and we will have some of our new antennas for sale.

Check out the podcast here www.fotimepodcast.com

The new antenna is a very compact end-fed wire antenna is a combination wire winder, matching transformer and wire. The base winder material is FR4 PCB material like the PackTenna feed point in the shape of a long “X”. There is an option for either a 9:1 UNUN for a random wire antenna using a tuner or 50:1 UNUN for an end-fed half wave antenna that requires no tuner. The “X” shape allows you to wind the antenna wire on the device making a super compact antenna. We are using 26 ga copper clad steel wire so it’s small but strong.

We will also publish how you can make your own dual band end-fed wire antenna by adding a simple coil to the end of the wire plus some extra antenna wire. You can make a simple coil taking a 2-1/2″ piece of common white 1″ diameter PVC pipe and wind 51 turns of 26 ga wire and with a little tuning you can have a 20m/40m dual band half wave end-fed antenna !

There are 2mm banana sockets to allow you to plug in the existing PackTenna wire elements. There is a BNC connector for the feedline.

Take a look at the enclosed picture and you will get the idea. This is a picture of the prototype with the 9:1 UNUN and 29′ of antenna wire.

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Survey Question

We are going to make both both kinds of antenna configuration and we would like to get your opinion. What would you prefer…?

A) 9:1 UNUN with random wire (29′) that would work on all bands and require an antenna tuner.

B) 50:1 UNUN with 31′ tuned 1/2 wave on 20m – requires no tuner.

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We are about to manufacture a pile of both. Which one would you prefer?

Please post your thoughts here or email to george@packtenna.com