Ham sticks + Ham Tenna etc. (Part 2)

So, what have I accomplished. I’m not really sure that I have accomplished anything. What I do know is that the whip for my 20 Meter stick antenna was too short. At least for where I was mounting it. Which is less than optimal. I don’t know the originally un-cut whip length that the antenna ships with. I have not found that documented anywhere by any of the manufacturers.

Let me recap. I don’t think I covered my tuning experience with the 20 Meter MFJ stick. So, when trying to tune my 20 – meter stick. I got to a point where the whip needed to be longer than it was. To get the SWR below 2.0. Extending the whip was making the SWR drop like it should. I thought I had figured it out till I ran out of whip. Now I thought I bought the whip brand new. At a ham fest a few years back. But who knows maybe someone bought and returned it and had already over trimmed it.

Going thru a bunch of used ham stick whips. I notice many were a good 2 inches longer than the whip I was using. So, I said what the hell let me try one. JOY 1.5 SWR with the whip fully extended. So, yes, I spend hours trying to tune the nearly untune-able.

But before I got to that point. I bought a NANO VNA. This confirmed Exactly what I was seeing with the Surecom SW-28. Which was very nice to see, I liked being able to confirm the data with a second method. Also, I was able to do the same job. Tuning the 20 – meter stick in 1 quarter the time with the help of the NANO-VNA. So, the $60 I spent on it was well worth it. I will cover it in another article.

The Nano VNA I used was the: Vector Network Antenna Analyzer <-Affiliate link.

There seem to be a wide variety of them that look identical. So do your own research. I must say it did the job perfectly.

Closing

In closing of part 2. Stay tuned for a part 4 wait what happened to 3? Yes, now I have a functioning 20 – meter ham stick at least for the voice portion of the band. I was able to successfully make over 40 contacts with it. I also didn’t have to use as much power to get out. I didn’t need my AT-100Pro Autotuner either.

What’s left. Well, I still don’t have many answers for the questions in part 1. Maybe I’ll get to them parts 3 or 5. My next test is to see how the antenna performs in a different mount. I plan to test it in my Gabil antenna tripod with adapter. Yes, I know it’s not meant for this. I like doing things differently. Yes, and strangely very wrong as well. I’m curious to see if I can get away without the ground radials.

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