Every Station He Can Hear: Bernie KB6FRD's 24-Footer Under a Nevada Sky

Signal Report · Spanish Springs, Nevada

The note came in on a Sunday afternoon, an hour after the CQ World Wide email went out. No preamble. Just the log.

Every station he can hear. That sentence is the whole design brief, and it is worth taking apart, because it is not luck and it is not the sky — though the sky in his photo does not hurt.

Why a Pileup Breaks

Hawaii from northern Nevada on 17 meters is a 2,500-mile shot over salt water, and the signal that makes it arrives low — a few degrees above the horizon after one or two hops off the ionosphere. A pileup is a crowd of stations all shouting at the same operator in Hilo. The one he hears is not the loudest at the transmitter. It is the one whose energy is pointed at the arrival angle.

A vertical dipole puts its energy there by nature: low, and in every direction at once. There is no beam to swing, no lobe pointed at the clouds. At 24 feet the antenna is a little over a third of a wavelength on 17 meters, and the pattern is still clean — one broad lobe, hugging the horizon. That is the physics behind "every station I can hear." If the signal is arriving, it is arriving at the angle this antenna is built to send.

And the half of the antenna that most verticals bury is standing in the air. The return current flows in the lower element, not in the Nevada dirt. High-desert soil is dry and poor, and a radial-fed vertical pays for that in heat. This one does not.

5/7 both ways, 100 watts. No amplifier, no tower, no radial field. A flagpole.

The Base Is the Other Half of the Story

Look at what is at ground level: the Tilt-Up Base, and a rock that is not a rock. The remote tuner lives under it, dry and invisible, with the feedline run short and sealed. That is the cleanest answer we know to "where does the tuner go?" — at the antenna, where it matches on every band, and under something the HOA has no opinion about.

The tilt is why the flag, the whip, and the hardware are a one-person job for life. When the Washoe County wind comes down off the Sierra, the whole pole walks down to the ground and back up without a ladder. Fourteen seconds shows the whole move →

What Comes Next for a Station Like This

A 24-footer with a tilt is already most of the way to the strongest configuration we make. The 9-foot DX Whip threads into the top fitting in two minutes with the pole walked down, and it turns the 24 into a Skyline 33 — the classic 40-meter height, with the bonus moving to 17 meters, the very band he just broke a pileup on. As the nights get long and 40, 80, and 160 open up, that is the piece that pays.

He is already set up to try it without a ladder.

Thank you, Bernie, for the note and the photos. Every station you can hear — that is the sentence we build to.

Ham Radio is fun again! Pass it on... 73, Jon KL2A