I just finished WAS on 160 meters which gives me WAS on 9 bands. So I thought I'd try for WAS on 6 meters. Today, I put up a 6 Meter Delta loop at about 50ft. Fed with approx. 300ft of 33o Ohm ladder line back to the house to a 1:1 balun. Took the better part of the day to get the antenna up and route the line. I checked it with the analyzer and the SWR was about 2.7:1. I added a 4ft loop of ladder line which brought it down to ~1.3:1. Then, started calling CQ, but there's not much happening on 6M today, apparently. Look for me on 6 meters.
I helped a ham who's new to the hobby that emailed the club looking for help with his first radio. We met up over coffee at a diner and I programmed a couple of repeaters into his HT and showed him how to do it. Since we live out on the fringe of the area repeaters for HTs he was having trouble. I invited him to my house and we added a few more viable repeaters and gave him my longer flexible whip to keep. We plan on meeting tomorrow for more "lunch and learn." Good times.
Got the root pole parts fabricated and installed on the top of my tower so now I have a mounting point for the R-6000.
Tested my attic delta loop for 20m. I could hear in the first minutes that it is not good enough - my garden vertical loop provided much higher signal levels. Although the DL was tuned well (SWR below 1,5 along the whole band), it does not mean anything (a dummy load has a good SWR as well, actually). Finally the RBN provided an even more convincing image: Call at 1527Z is on delta loop, the 1532Z call is on the garden vertical loop. Later a small surprise about the propagation (with the vertical loop of course): I don't remember if I ever had 24dB SNR from NA on RBN. So I removed the delta loop. At least I tried and again learnt something. My attic is not for this type of antennas.
