As far as hobbies go, ham radio tends to be on the more expensive side. A dual-band mobile radio can easily run $600, and a high-end HF base station with the capability of more than 100 watts will easily be in the thousands of dollars. But, like most things, there’s an aspect to the hobby that can be incredibly inexpensive and accessible to newcomers. Crystal radios, for example, can be built largely from stuff most of us would have in our parts drawers, CW QRP radios don’t need much more than that, and sometimes even the highest-performing antennas are little more than two lengths of wire.
For this specific antenna, [W3CT] is putting together an inverted-V which is a type of dipole antenna. Rather than each of the dipole’s legs being straight, the center is suspended at some point relatively high above ground with the two ends closer to the earth. Dipoles, including inverted-Vs, are resonant antennas, meaning that they don’t need any tuning between them and the radio so the only thing needed to match the antenna to the feed line is a coax-to-banana adapter. From there it’s as simple as attaching the two measured lengths of wire for the target band and hoisting the center of the antenna up somehow. In [W3CT]’s case he’s using a mast which would break the $8 budget, but a tree or building will do just as well.
The video on the construction of this antenna goes into great detail, so if you haven’t built a dipole yet or you’re just getting started on your ham radio journey, it’s a great place to get started. From there we’d recommend checking out an off-center-fed dipole which lets a dipole operate efficiently on multiple bands instead of just one, and for more general ham radio advice without breaking the bank we’d always recommend the $50 Ham series.
Expensive? Not really considering the reoccurring costs are nil. Try playing golf once a weekend for a year and you’ve spent the price of a good rig. Now play another year and you’ve lost the money but still have a good rig. Plus you can easily sell that $600 for $400 and maybe more. K5RUD
Paying to go golfing every weekend isn’t a good reference point for what’s cheap. That’s not typically a poor person’s hobby. A cheap hobby would be something like writing or playing video games. Digital photography (using things other than smartphones) seems like a more apt thing to compare to ham radio – the good stuff does have a certain investment barrier to entry, but there’s not much ongoing costs and there’s ways to save money and get most of the way there. It’s generally thought of as a hobby that can get pretty expensive, and as similar as they are, I would say it’s both or neither.
“meaning that they don’t need any tuning between them and the radio so the only thing needed to match the antenna to the feed line is a coax-to-banana adapter.”
Tell us more about the coax to banana adapter!
B^)
It’s technical name is the Cavendish match. The interesting thing is it is 44 ohms.
“As far as hobbies go, ham radio tends to be on the more expensive side.”
Same can be said about vintage computer hobby, hi-fi equipment and model making (r/c planes, ships and cars; model trains). 🙂
Video not searchable. Did he mention the need for a balun?
He’s using a BNC male to double banana jack adapter. No balun. The banana jacks are also binding posts which makes connecting the antenna wires very convenient. The video is the linked sentence at the end of the first paragraph. Skip to about 21:30 and he shows connecting the antenna wires to the adapter.
3:44
Thanks Andrew.
OK. “air choke” Better than nothing.
He uses a banana instead!
You can buy a 5 band qrp transceiver for 100 – 200 euro/dollar. It won’t perform the same as a 3500 costing high end base station but both are capable to reach the other side of the world.
.. in CW or PSK31 or WSPR. Maybe.
Normal SSB QSOs in the city need at least 20W, if not more.
No offense, but that “with 1W around the world” is a myth.
There’s are reason OPs used to joke “life is too short for QRP”. 😉
I mean, it works, but only with an efficient antenna.
Like a standard half-wave dipole (40m lenght for 80m band, 20m length for 40m etc).
Or just wait for next solar cycle maximum, which happens every 11 years.
In practice, you’re trading in the need for a normal 100W transceiver for a need for an $1.000 HF 6-element beam/Fritzel beam/quad beam antenna on your roof or
a farm land were you can set up your 40m long wire antenna.
Life is too short for doing things that don’t present any sort of challenge. Store-bought 100W transceiver is a waste of time and money.
It depends. If you do participate ham radio because of “rag chew”, then it’s not a waste to have a normal transceiver.
That being said, I see no contradiction here.
That QRP toy is so cheap it can be owned in addition no problem.
So just have them both, and start your conversation with the notmal transceiver.
Then you can try to establish another conversation with your QSO partner.
If he/she has the nerves and the patience to play the game.
By the way, that used to be the usual method of making contacts.
Amateurs start with QRO (or normal power), then go down and limit the power to a reasonable level.
” Store-bought 100W transceiver”
When I must read lines like this.. As if QRP was the only way of homebrew. 🙄
Dude, my father had built linears when he was young and sold them.
Back then, 10W was the mediocre output of an average driver tube.
People who do ham radio with 10W are like car drivers who drive their car with the starter motor!
I used to be active on QRP CW. My second rig was a Heathkit HW-8, and the first night I had it on the air, in Southern California, I worked all the southeastern states, plus up the west coast and Japan. When I took it to Hawaii, I regularly worked New Zealand, Japan, and Central America. One time, I worked someone in the Middle East, almost the exact opposite side of the earth. This was all with random-length wire antennas suspended from trees and the eves of the house, and my home-made transmatch. Then I found out I was only putting out half the 2½ watts the HW-8 was supposed to be putting out. This transmatch could match any reasonable length of wire to 50+j0Ω. The article says, “Dipoles, including inverted-Vs, are resonant antennas, meaning that they don’t need any tuning between them and the radio…” All “resonant” means is that its impedance falls on the center line of the Smith chart, at the frequency of interest. It does not mean it’s 50Ω; and if there’s a length of transmission line between the transmitter and the antenna, the impedance will march around the Smith chart, and the angle could land most anywhere, determined by the length of the transmission line compared to the wavelength in the line. (FWIW, I used to work in applications engineering at a place that made VHF and UHF power transistors mostly for military radars and communications, and I had to get really cozy with the Smith chart.)
“I used to be active on QRP CW. [..] ”
Biased. 🙄😮💨
No offense, but you should try this again in 21th century in a city with a high noise floor.
16 feet, 48 inches? Isn’t that 20 feet? I think you meant to say 16 feet, 4.8 inches. 😉
I’ll throw a huge non sponsored plug in for QRPlabs. For fast-food-for-two money you can get a 5W QRP radio in band if your choice. Even maxed out with all the options including enclosure and stuff it’s still very accessible. Plus as a kit you learn by doing and the very best part is the documentation is insanely good. Not just for assembly but full schematics and explanation of how it works and what engineering decisions went into parts selection. Incredible.
QRP transceiver.. I remember the Pixie transceiver (glorified oscillator), it was junk. It was a cool gadget, but not fun to use for real QSOs.
The Tubixie was such a better design and it had worked more reliable, in my opinion.
Then there are the uSDX series. They work as expected, but are QRP (up to 10W*).
Good luck doing a real QSO in SSB. It works, but the other side has a hard time understanding you.
And that’s not ham spirit, I think.
You shouldn’t never make the other side suffering because you’re cheap on money.
Give your best, at least. It’s a matter of respect torwards others who must endure you.
*10W on a dipole is borderline. Things are about to work, but not fully yet.
100W isn’t needed, maybe but 20W or 50W would be reasonable.
If you have a QRP transceiver, consider building a little PA that outputs 20W.
We seem to differ when it comes to what the ham spirit entails. Yes, part of the ham spirit is in making your signal as readable as possible. But another part of it (and also the law, by the way,) is to not transmit with any more power than necessary. It’s all about advancing the state of the art, or at least the state of your own personal art. But then, if you’re talking about the uSDX radios specifically, I guess you’re right. These have been designed to use the absolute cheapest hardware possible, at the cost of a very low quality signal. I bought one of these, and after hearing my own signal, I was too embarrassed to use it again. This isn’t even the spirit of QRP. To misquote Einstein, the point is to communicate as simply as possible, but no simpler.
“We seem to differ when it comes to what the ham spirit entails.”
Maybe. I simply try to protect others from articles like this by
giving a more realistic view on the situation (despite me being an optimist by heart).
Because, articles like this can give false hope, even if not intended.
They give an unrealistic picture of how easy (or difficult) it is to become QRV.
It’s like with amateur astronomy, I think.
Beginners see fantastic pictures of planets and galaxies that others have taken and then believe they can do it, too.
But once they have bought an entry-level telescope, they will be disillusioned.
No planets, no galaxies. just blurred points of light.
– And there’s light pollution, too, akin to high noise floor in ham radio.
At this point, many beginners are deeply disappointed and give up the hobby and never come back.
And exactly the same damage is caused by QRP fanatics who only tell them about successes but not about failures.
They harm the hobby. They disappoint others. Simply by raising false expectations. 73s.
I agree, thank you for your understanding, too. 🙂
Sorry also for being a bit to blunt, I should have chosen more thoughtful words.
Personally, I grew up in a ham household and did participate CB radio.
Thus, I suppose I saw both extremes of the hobby. People who either had used to little power (0,5W to 4W) and too much (300W to 2KW).
My father had used up to 2KW (QRO) out on a Yaesu FL-2100 PA (w/ US tubes; otherwise 750W by default) when he was young and had a house with a garden, but backed down all by himself to a humble 100W in recent years.
He also has a QRP transceiver to play with, but it’s hard to make SSB QSOs with it under less than optimal band conditions.
Despite him using a monoband diople with an RG213 cable, an 1:1 balun and a fine SWR (1:1,3).
haha i read this article solely because i wanted to know what mechanical hack they’d come up with to make that mast ‘cheap’. oh well
When I saw the Title Shot, I thought he was hanging it from the overhead power lines! (eek!)
I am using an inverted V antenna, and it works well. One of the advantages is that usually you can get the center higher than a flat top dipole since you only have to have one support. It’s the center of the antenna that is most important. Nice post! aj4sn
I run a QRP Labs QDX.
Cost me less than $100, does single tone digital modes, sends 4 Watts to an elevated Butternut HF6V vertical, runs JS8 24/7, and gets decoded regularly by stations all across North America on 40m and 20m.
It gets out fine.
That makes sense, considering that the US has ~50 states next to each other.
You can have a humble station and “get out fine” no problem.
Same goes to Japan, too, I suppose. It has small country with an high population density.
The situation in Europe might be different, though.
I think we don’t have as many shortwave amateurs in our neighborhood that are constantly being QRV on shortwave.
We rather have to go and search.
The situation is made even worse, because lower license classes (popular among the young) are not allowed to go to 20m or 40m.
They’re being restricted to 10m, 15m, 80m, 160m.
The latter two bands, which are historically relevant,
do need huge antennas, though, which students and teenagers can’t afford to set up.
It’s sort of a dilemma. Sigh.
Uh, Joshua, you DO know that Europe has ~50 states next to each other too, and their total area is very similar to that of the USA, right?
That’s not same, though. Amateur radio has its roots in the US and the license exams are more easy, less bureaucratic there.
You could say the US is the home land of amateur radio.
Pleaee have a look at ARRL and its history.
By contrast, we don’t have that many hams in EU. On paper, maybe, but not in practice.
The hams here are also overaged and are more passive here.
You won’t find a random QSO partner any time, on any band.
In the US, you have teenagers participating the hobby,
maybe having that infamous Technican class.
Here in Europe/my country, it’s almost an sensation if a thirty-something appears on local FM repeater.
Um, maybe I haven’t worded this properly here. It doesn’t do justice.
I’m not saying we don’t have young hams here, we do.
It’s just that they’re not spread evenly across the landscape.
Some places have many hams, while others have almost none.
So it’s better to check the websites of the local clubs and see if there is youth activity.
Some villages and towns are very dedicated when it comes to supporting youth activity.
How does a basic antenna already used (for decades no less) by probably at least a hundred thousand ham radio operators worldwide qualify as a “hack”?
Because he used a banana.
I use a xiegu g90 which operates up to 20w max. I have made over 2000 contacts with 14 countries since April of this year. I have the g90 run to a homemade in the attic. Dipole was constructed from an extension cord I had cut while trimming trees. Just peeled off the outer orange plastic cover and use the wires cut to 16 feet. They are connect to a pl239 connector in a piece of 1 1/2 inch pvc pipe. Total cost: g90 $450, 30 ft rg8x coax cable $25, pl 239 connector $5.50, antenna $0, results in a cost of less than $500. Added a lifepo4 battery and a random wire for antenna and it also works in remote areas without electric power.
Greetings everyone. Great comments and points of view. This is what makes our hobby fun, interesting and diverse. There is truly something for everyone to pursue and enjoy. I operate both QRP and QRO. My personal QRP claim is working a VK7 in Tasmania on 4 watts CW using a Carolina Windom (OCF) at 60 feet. The coax run from my shack to the antenna feed point is about 280 feet of LMR400. The radio used was my YouKits HB-1B CW transceiver. This particular qso qualified me for a 1000 Mile Per Watt Award. Fun stuff.
Cheers and 73s
Glenn/N3COB
I’ve used my (tr)USDX with a simple dipole (no balun) to make hundreds of contacts since owning it. The radio was less than $200 CAD, the coax about $50 and the dipole itself made from scrap wire (often cat5e network cable). I must say though, I would have tried to get those legs up higher than that, more towards a 120-150⁰ angle, instead of the “45⁰ angle or so” – ie 90⁰ being used.
While I haven’t hosted any formal nets with my little QRP rig, I did manage to facilitate an informal gathering one night with a VO1 (Newfoundland), VE3 (Ontario), VE7 (BC) and a VE8 (Northwest Territories) station while I was in DO45 (Northern Alberta). I also had nightly chats with the VE8 station (1800 km away) and could regularly talk to the VO1 station (at 3800 km) when I couldn’t get a cell signal from the same remote QTH and also made SSB contacts with southern Chile, Hawaii, Greece, etc with no complaints. Was it digital quality voice, full quieting audio every time? Of course not! But who says that’s necessary? In all cases that I am aware of, both parties were quite happy with the QSO’s.
The same radio has been used with WinLink to successfully send emails in EMCOMM training scenarios. I’ve used it for digital communications with my Android connected to it via USB for both power and processor (output <1W). And I’ve also used it powered by USB only (again outputting <1W) and a simple no balun dipole in a tree to successfully complete a POTA activation, including a contact from Northern Ontario to Spain.
Does it mean the end of high powered high end rigs and amps, 200 ft towers with actuated beam antennas and a beautiful ham shack? Of course not! But it does lower that barrier to entry, making it affordable and even fun for people who may not be ready to toss $1500 CAD into a comparable brand name rig.
To expand on the astronomy comparison, I have been quite satisfied using my 8″ Newtonian to find Messier and NCG objects, view Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons and explore our own Moon and can easily toss it in my truck to go to remote Bortle 1 locations (along with my binoculars), while my friend with his 20″ with admittedly remarkable views is largely restricted to his home with Bortle 5 skies. And also, building my own Newtonian is well within my capabilities (if I can ever find the time to finish grinding the mirror, sitting half done in my garage).
“To expand on the astronomy comparison, I have been quite satisfied using my 8″ Newtonian to find Messier and NCG objects, view Saturn’s rings and Jupiter’s moons and explore our own Moon and can easily toss it in my truck to go to remote Bortle 1 locations (along with my binoculars), while my friend with his 20″ with admittedly remarkable views is largely restricted to his home with Bortle 5 skies. And also, building my own Newtonian is well within my capabilities (if I can ever find the time to finish grinding the mirror, sitting half done in my garage).”
Cool! So you did start the hobby with your homemade telescope and then you had instant success at spotting Saturn rings and Deep Sky objects?
That’s cool, I salute you! No wonder you found fulfillment in the hobby.
Unfortunatelly, not all begindo make this experience.
Some read about entry-class telescopes and QRP transceivers without prior experience and and are ready for an disappointment.
Simply because their expections weren’t met, they were too high!
If they had an elmer on their side giving them tips and access to good equipment, the outcome would have been more happy.
They might realize that they can do it, under good circumstances.
Unfortunatelly, it’s not like this in practice.
Most live in a city, have merely a small balcony and have high noise floor and light pollution.
Especially in amateur astronomy community (forums), you’re being told that “cheap” telescopes are not recommended (cheap in terms of quality, the price is still hefty to amateurs).
They tell you to save up the money and get a quality model with good optics from ~1500€ upwards, rather than a Chinese made telescope sold for, say, 350€ in a catalog.