Antennas for Field Day.

Simple HF Antennas for the ARRL Field Day.

Views expressed in this Field Day Antenna article are those of Dale Hunt (WB6BYU).

Accessed on 16 May 2025, 2206 UTC.

Content and Source derived from "Antennas for Field Day" by Dale Hunt (WB6BYU).

Site URL-- https://practicalantennas.com/applications/portable/fieldday/

Please check URL for the complete article. Scroll down to read a basic summary of Dale's post.

Thanks for joining us today.

Aloha es 73 de Russ (KH6JRM).

Article summary:

"Other Antenna notes

I’ve tried a number of different Field Day antennas over the years. Some worked well, some didn’t. Here is my experience with several of them. Overall, many don’t seem that much better than a dipole.

End-fed long wire, 40m (130 feet) with a manual tuner. Worked OK. Direction of maximum radiation changes with frequency, but works reasonably well from the West Coast with the free end pointed East toward the most distant stations for the higher bands, giving broadside coverage North/South on the lower bands. (Worked great sloping over salt water, though!)

End-fed long wire, 200m ( 600 feet), sloping down a hill. Very poor, partly due to the fact that it sloped down the hill, and partly because the pattern was too narrow due to the length.

Vee beam with sloping 56 m (185 foot) legs. This had the feedpoint at about 10m (32 feet), with the legs sloping down and tied off 2 m (6 feet) above the ground. Each leg could be rotated individually to optimize the beam for various bands and directions. Tunable as a dipole down to 160m. Sounds great, worked OK. Sloping legs reduced the average height of the antenna – might have worked better if the legs were horizontal. Didn’t seem any better than many simpler antennas that took less space.

HF yagi. I have a triband TA-33jr (shown in the lead photo), along with light 2-element 15m and 3-element 10m monobanders, and often borrow a 6-element beam for 6m, that we put on 9-10m (28 – 32 ft) sectional masts. These can be installed by 2 or 3 people fairly easily once the antennas are assembled. Larger beams (4-el on 20m) have been used by welding a custom bracket to mount them on the side of an existing telephone pole. From here on the West Coast we generally just point them towards the East Coast and don’t bother with rotators, but in other situations manual rotation may be useful (mounting the beam on a rotator sleeve with a rope tied to one end of the boom makes a simple “Armstrong” rotator).

80m full wave horizontal loop. This worked well, but was more work to install, and requires more supports in the right places. Reasonable SWR using 4 : 1 balun at feedpoint, or feed with ladder line to a tuner. Very good multiband antenna.

40m doublet fed with ladder line. Worked 40m / 20m / 15m. Had trouble getting it to tune on 20m some years, depending on the exact length of the ladder line. Not quite as good as the big loop, but easier to install. Very slightly better than a dipole on 20m, similar on 40m and 15m. Replaced by dipoles and coax feed, which eliminated the tuner. Would be better if backed up with reflectors for 20m and 40m (as would the dipoles that replaced it.)

40m 2- and 3-element quads. Another great idea that didn’t always work as well as I had hoped. Actually, we used a 2-element quad (wooden spreader with wire elements) for many years and it worked well, as it was high enough off the ground on a hilltop, but those hanging from ropes between shorter trees suffered from lack of height. With delta loop elements, try to keep the bottom wires at least 6m (20 feet) off the ground.

80m 2-element quad. This might have worked well if I could get the reflector fixed, but the wires were passed over tree branches instead of being held up with ropes, and I ended up standing on a ladder with my arms stretched in opposite directions, each holding one end of the reflector wire and no way to pull them closer to join them. Again, low height was a limitation for longer distances. I also learned not to try to tune a big wire loop with a dip meter when another station nearby is transmitting. Actually, the driven element worked well enough by itself.

40m 200 ohm delta loop (point down). While nearly as long as a dipole, and slightly less gain, this antenna worked well because of the wide SWR bandwidth, so it didn’t need retuning if it didn’t get installed exactly as modeled. One version used a 4 : 1 balun, the other a quarter wave of “zip cord” (around 105 ohms) as a matching section. Very good monoband antenna.

Wideband 80m dipole using computer ribbon cable. Worked about as well as a dipole, of course, but covered the whole band with under 1.5 : 1 SWR. Particularly good for SSB across the 3.6 – 4.0 MHz range.

G5RV. This isn’t necessarily a bad antenna, but it didn’t work very well on 80m SSB (3.9 MHz) the one time I tried it. This might have been the lack of a balun and resulting ground losses from common mode current, losses in a long feedline with high SWR, or they were trying to use the band too early in the evening, before the D-layer absorption had dropped and/or other stations had migrated down to that band. Would be best with balanced line to a tuner rather than the hybrid coax feed system if used on bands other than 40m and 20m, or with a relatively short coax.

15m Folded Bruce curtain hanging from a fire lookout tower. Another good example of youthful enthusiasm and energy. We started with an 8-element curtain, but had been given the wrong tower height, and cut it down to 6 (about 23m or 75 feet tall) to make it fit. But we couldn’t hear any Field Day stations: it was totally useless. With all the US stations crowding the band, the strongest signal was an A6 working a station in France. Now, there may be times when that would be an ideal antenna response, but this Field Day was not one of them.

40m Bobtail Curtain. This was strung up on a hilltop Field Day site, fed with a tuner at the bottom of the center wire (covered with a plastic dish pan to keep it dry). It seemed like a good idea, but we never used it because the other 40m antenna worked well enough. However, when the 20m beam failed, we used the Bobtail to keep that station on the air, and it actually worked fairly well.

Quick links:

A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO FIELD DAY

FIELD DAY ANTENNA SELECTION GUIDE.

FIELD DAY WIRE LENGTH TABLE

FIELD DAY CHECKLIST

Simple Ham Radio Antennas