A loading coil for 80m

As the days grow shorter with the approach of winter and activity shifts towards longer wavelengths, I took stock of my log and noticed that while I have racked up a reasonable number of contacts on 15, 20 and 40 meters, 80 meters lags far behind. I anticipate moving overseas in about six months, but before I go, I’d like to even up the score on 80 meters for this QTH.

My lack of contacts on 80m is a function of my antenna limitations — where I live, I can’t put a lot of metal in the sky. I have one outdoor antenna, a 43-foot vertical; the rest of my antennas are in my attic. My vertical antenna is, intentionally, not much to look at: a single, black wire that runs from the ground up into the top of a tree and is almost impossible to see from a few feet away. However, under the gravel of my backyard, there is a DX-Engineering radial plate. Eight radials spike out underground from that point under my property and into the adjoining forest.  The antenna is fed by a coax line that runs underground from the house to that plate, where the center conductor feeds right into the antenna. The antenna was never very well tuned on any specific band, but it managed pretty well on 30 and 40 meters with either built-in or external tuners in the shack. With difficulty, it could tune 15 and 17 meters, and my LDG tuner could force it to work on 80 meters, but the amount of energy actually going out the antenna was pitifully small.

So, I decided that for this winter, the vertical would become a dedicated 80m antenna. The attic antennas can handle the other bands. My first thought was to make an inverted L for 80m, but the far end would extend off my property and would increase visibility of the antenna, particularly in the winter when there are fewer leaves for cover. I decided to work with the vertical radiating wire that was already in position, but to interpose a loading coil at the base.

Pete, K6BFA, lent me his MFJ antenna analyzer, and I measured the impedance of the antenna at the point where I anticipated the matching coil would be located. I measured at 3.7 Mhz, a bit higher in frequency than where I intended to operate and the complex component of impedance measured 278j. Since the antenna is a shortened radiator, this would be capacitive reactance, so -278j.  I calculated the inductive reactance needed to null it out as xL = Xc/2*pi*freq, or 11.9 uH.

I had made a coil form from Schedule 40 PVC labeled “one and a half” inches, but measured its outer diameter as 1.9 inches. I wanted to wind a coil big enough for the about 12 uH needed above, plus extra so I would have some for shunt inductance (which I guessed would be around 2-5 uH).  I figured 18 uH would be enough to have room to spare. Using the formula of n-turns = sqrt(inductance((18 * coil diameter)(40 * coil length)))/coil diameter, all values in inches, I came up with a three inch long coil with about 28 turns. This fit nicely inside the box that I had, so I went with it.  Note that the coil shown in the box in the picture was my first attempt, and the coil turned out to be too small. There is a learning curve for this sort of thing, you know.

The coil was mounted on nylon screws and coils were made rigid with epoxy. The coil wire itself was some 18 gauge hook up wire that turned out to be too large for my protoboard, so I am glad it found a good home in the matching coil.  The top of the coil goes to the antenna. The coax comes in the side of the box, and initially, I probed the coil to find a good matching point tuning at 3.7Mhz, intentionally above the CW portion of the band, where I wanted to operate. I found the optimal spot to bring the complex portion of the impedance to zero, and then played with the ground lead, trying to find a point lower on the coil that would yield lowest SWR at 3.560 Mhz, the QRP CW watering hole frequency.  After playing with the placement of these two leads for a while, I was satisfied with the resulting SWR curve, which is shown below.

I could have shifted the curve higher in frequency, but I really don’t operate much voice, so I made the decision to optimize the antenna for CW and digital mode transmission at the lower frequency end of the band.

Back in the shack, I verified that I got the same measurements and switched the antenna through to my K3. The rig read the antenna as SWR near 1:1, so I made a couple test transmissions and worked stations in Hungary, Italy and Jamaica. I then turned power to 5W and worked a station in NY. It’s anecdotal, but the antenna seemed to be working fine. After calling CQ at 5W, I checked the reverse beacon network and noted that I was greater than 10 dB above noise as reported by stations in W1, W2, W3, W4, W5 and W7, which seems much better than previously.

Some references:

Making a loading coil for 43-foot vertical antennas (de AD5X)

Winding your own coils (de W3JIP)

Coil inductance calculator (imperial and metric)

One more reference (added Jan 2020). K6STI contacted me to mentioned that he had developed a free Windows program that calculates nductance and Q for solenoids of solid or Litz wire. It accounts for self-resonance, form dielectric, wire conductivity, and lead length. The program includes an optimizer and measured accuracy data. You can download the latest version of COILS from http://ham-radio.com/k6sti/coil.zip. The text documentation that comes with this package provides some useful tables regarding inductance of solid and litz wire coils as well as links to other references.