Excellent thread...the antenna, balun and feed line often end up weighing nearly as much as the battery. Chuck, what are you using as a feed line to stay as light as possible? LMR240 superflex is my go-to for jumpers and light weight, low loss feed lines, but it's heavier than desired for POTA and SOTA.
Hi Mindy You have asked a good question and I think very few QRP'ers ask and do the homework on this but of couse they can get away with things and not even know how much signal is being lost but if you try that approach at QRO you might have a fire on your hands! First you have to choose a core made from appropriate material for the frequency and type of application. Ferrite materials have published curves showing the complex permeability Ui and Uii and for a transformer you want a material where it is operating in a part of that chart where Ui is high and Uii is low. For power handling you have to look at core flux density for one thing which depends on several factors, mainly the peak driving voltage, the frequency and number of turns on the driving winding (usually the primary) and then the density of that flux being inversely proportional to the cross sectional area of the core. There are limits to the amount of flux the core can handle without getting hot. In some cases the windings themselves can be the area where things break down even when the core itself is in a reasonably safe area. As a rule of thumb a small core with few driving windings (like the common 1:49 autotransformer) at lower frequency end is asking for trouble. I found the best sources of info for me in understanding all this was in reading the technical info published by Amidon corp on their website. I will attach some of the best references here. The first one explains better what I wrote above and gives maximum flux density guidelines at the bottom. The second one goes through an example of the calculation. I also include a graph I made to visualize the max flux vs frequency according to the guidelines. Then there's a chart showing physical dimensions for common cores which you need for the cross-sectional area in the flux density calcs above. If you follow these references you can easily scale your designs for power and frequency and know exactly what you will get. You might even twist my arm to get you started on an example. Sevick's books are great for example transformer designs mostly QRO stuff but some of the material on baluns is quesionable at best and just plain wrong at worst. Don't believe anything you see about a 4:1 balun on a single core for example. Ham on....Joe
That's great , I too just did a 9:1 and it works good . I do like the 49:1 antenna better though. Thanks for sharing!
These are some great Ideas thankyou for sharing, everything goes in the memory bank lol if I can juse remeber it lol!
I don't use coax with the antenna unless I need some separation for setting up the radio. But I do carry a 1' piece of rg 316 if I need it. I have tried a counter poise also and it didn't seem to help or change anything.
some videos,audio is loud so my computer is ok. others i can barely hear...solution? guess im not in mood to mess with an xtra amp...
Several versions of this exist for sale with the transformer built onto the winder. One theory as to why you had a low SWR for 80 meters is that a half-wave for 40, is a quarter-wave on 80. It wants to work, but the impedance is low. You could use it without the transformer directly.