The rainy season runs from about November and sometime up to March, with peak cyclone activity at the height of summer, January and February. As a preventative measure, my next door neighbor trimmed one of the trees along our property line. I had some ropes in that tree to support a G5RV and when he gave me the heads up that crews would be whacking away at limbs, I thought it best to bring down the antenna. The G5RV never really hung high enough to work well and it stretched over the house, which may have added to noise, so I didn’t mind taking it down. Last week, I put up a new full wavelength 40m delta loop as a replacement.
I went with the delta loop because there is one large pine tree at the edge of the property and I was able to shoot a line over it with a wrist rocket. The lower corners are supported with guy lines from a telephone pole and another tree to each side of my house. The antenna is fed at the middle of the base, which is just at the edge of my roof, which makes it convenient to access. I had brought back a 50m roll of heavy duty green wire from Sotabeams in the UK. I have to remark that working with this very compliant wire was a pleasure after having made wire from household wire that loves to coil in the past.
By virtue of the position of supports, the antenna slopes from bottom to top towards the south, a bit more vertical than horizontal. Since I am feeding it from the bottom, the antenna polarization should be horizontal, but I believe that the sloping should add some directivity towards the North. I had considered feeding it up one side and using a quarter-wave of 75 ohm coax to transform the expected 100-ohm feed point impedance, but it would have been awkward to support a feedpoint at that position given what I had to work with.
I initially cut the antenna to a literal full wavelength, 299.8/7.1 * 1.05, where 1.05 was the fudge factor supplied in the ARRL antenna handbook. Initially, the resonant point was 6.9 Mhz, so I shortened the antenna in a few iterations, arriving at the intended 7.1 Mhz, where there was no reactive component and the resistive component was about 65 ohms — close enough to 50 for me to be happy to feed directly with 9913F7 coax and not worry about vSWR.
From the shack, the antenna works great with no tuner across 40m, but I don’t have a lot of experience at this point with regard to how the antenna performs. It is much louder on 40m than the hex beam, but most of the time that loudness is merely more noise thanks to the environment around the station.