Christopher, Vietnam and Tuvalu on four bands from Eastern North Carolina --
those are serious Pacific paths, and they answer most questions about this
antenna before I type a word. Thank you for the detailed report. Let me take
your three puzzles in order, because the next reader will have them too.
The quiet receive is the one to reframe: quieter is not deafer. Your OCF
dipole is a horizontal wire using its coax as part of the antenna -- which
means it hears your house, your neighbors' switching supplies, and every
bit of common-mode trash along the feedline. The vertical, choked at the
feedpoint, hears less of all that. The honest test is never the S-meter --
it is signal-to-noise. Same station, both antennas: if he is as readable or
better on the Greyline while the meter reads lower, your noise floor
dropped, and that is the feature, not the fault. You already wrote the
evidence yourself: 'still readable.' Watch FT8 SNR numbers side by side
for a week and the meter mystery usually solves itself.
Six and 160 are the two ends of the rope. First check that your tuner
covers 54 MHz at its rated range -- not every desktop auto does, and 6
meters is outside several of them. On 160, a 29-foot radiator is working
hard; dress the ladder line straight and clear -- no coiled slack, off the
ground, off metal -- because coiled balanced line is exactly what pushes a
marginal 160 match out of a tuner's reach. Your 4-foot extension, shipped
today, helps the low end honestly but modestly.
The aluminum transition cap: you are on the list, as promised.
And the fair hit on patience: guilty, with an explanation. Every antenna is
hand-built to order by a small shop, and the same hands that answer the
phone are on the bench. Your instinct is right -- a clean email through the
contact page gets the fastest, most complete answer we can give.
Enjoy the tilt base -- and when the extension goes on, I want the Tuvalu
rematch report. Bands are up and down this month as Cycle 25 slides
down the other side of it's world class peak. The pleasure is ours, Christopher.
Ham Radio is fun again!
73, Jon KL2A -- Greyline Performance
435-200-4902
A good tuner, a clean match, and the SWR wandering from 17 meters down. The tuner is fine; the antenna is moving. The three usual suspects, the physics of why low bands suffer first, and the free fix to try before you buy anything.
