80m Off Centre Fed Dipole

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It's been a busy start for me so far this year with little time to blog. I hope you are all enjoying life to the full and getting on. As for Ham Radio it's been a bit slow with not so many opportunities to make DX or any kind of decent qso. My evening operating has been mainly swl style on 40m and 80m as the higher end of HF has more often than not closed down at sunset. About six months back I put up a balanced doublet for 80m but now I have come to the end of the experiments and have concluded that the configuration is not best suited to my setup. The dipole was very noisy compared to my vertical Hustler 6btv and at times was unusable due to extreme noise levels on 80m.
Earlier I remade the configuration of the dipole into an OCF dipole which basically means one leg is 81 feet long and the other leg is 50 feet. The total length is 131 feet and it's fed with 50 ohm coax into a 4:1 balun at 25 feet above the ground. I have used 3 support points with nylon insulators allowing most of the length to be straight and at both ends I have around about  10 - 15 feet of wire bent down towards the ground.


The OCF dipole is showing SWR readings of less than 1.8 on 80m and 40m all the way across the bands without the ATU with much less noise than the balanced dipole. I tried it on both 40m and 80m with the amp inline and its looking much better so far. I cant wait to get on with more tests and experments over the next few month's, the bands might offer some surprises as I keep hearing the odd rare DX when the bands open up. This happens quite a lot but it's getting the timings right to play radio, but we all have that problem. Until next time, best 73.

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