I’ve never seen so much activity on a band in my life as I get with this antenna, and I’m coming in 59 to the west coast on 10 watts now! My second contact on the antenna was in Chile!

I found a design for a 20 meter “Compact Vertical Dipole” in this year’s (2008) ARRL Handbook, given to me for the holidays by my very understanding wife! (update: Read the construction notes here)

This dipole is suspended about 6 feet above ground, has two 10 foot steel conduits for radiators and is fed through the pvc separator in the middle. The relatively short height is made up for by capacitance wires which you can see on the top and several more along the bottom. It took me about 6 hours to construct including trips to the store and hopefully it will last the winter at least. If you want to build one, steel conduit is cheap but not likely to last a long time due to its weakness, use aluminum instead if you can get it. Early testing shows an SWR of 1.5:1 or less across all of 20 meters, no tuning needed.

The biggest difference however is the noise level. I am living in a ham’s nightmare neighborhood with power lines above ground on both sides of my house and tons of noise. My other “HF Antenna” the rain gutters previously written about collect it in droves too.

This vertical dipole has such a great signal to noise ratio, it’s really something!

Here are a few pictures. The antenna almost fits entirely inside my tree, it would even be invisible had last year’s ice storm not demolished half of the tree.