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THE KK5ID 6 METER ROTATABLE DELTA LOOP
PROJECT The 6 Meter
Band may be dead at times, but help bring it to life with
Larry's rotatable loop project. Simple, easy to build and won't
break the bank. Straight from Gun Barrel City, Texas, (Home of
Hamuniverse.com), where antennas are "Smokin" over Cedar Creek
Lake in East Texas. Get out your weapons, load up this "Six"
shooter and fire a couple of rounds at 6 meter fun with this
antenna project!

Construction
Details The Delta Loop is bi-directional, with usable lobes
off the ends and has been one of my favorite antennas. I have
found that it will perform quite well in a fixed position. The 6
meter loop is small enough to erect a form around it and I have done
this with ˝” electrical pvc schedule 40 pipe with dowel inserted
inside for extra strength. The caps and tees were put on without
glue at first to get the size and shape I wanted and then it was
dismantled one section at a time and glued with pvc glue. After it
was put together, I inserted one self taping screw at each
connection to make sure that it was solid. The design of the support
came from a sleepless night vision. Is it funny
looking? Sorta! Can it be improved on? Yes. Does it work?
You bet!
The antenna works best if the "crust" side
of the "pie slice shape" is up and the support accomplishes this.
You are now able to put it in a rotor and rotate for bi-directional
transmissions.
Impress Your Neighbors The
electrical characteristics of the Delta Loop can be found in any
antenna book so I won’t dwell on that aspect. The formula for the
wire is 1005 divided by frequency. Or 20' 5/8" at 50.1. over all
length. The legs then will be 6' 8 3/16". I used 75 ohm coax,
(rg11), because of the close match to the 90 to100 ohm feed point.
50 ohm line can be used which will have an SWR of 1.8 to 2.0 to 1 at
the transmitter. The easiest way to match is with a tuner, however a
matching transformer of 75 ohm cut at a quarter wave length times
the velocity factor (.66) can be used to lower the SWR when using 50
ohm. To me it is a lot to do about nothing……….cut the wire, attach
the coax, connect to a tuner and get after it. I painted my
support black but you could paint yours red white and blue. This
would surely impress your neighbors. Mine is only up above the roof
line, maybe 30 feet or so and has shown good results in working Es.
Tropo should be a piece of cake and as far as F2, time will tell. I
use a 20 meter multi-band Delta for 40 and up and it works as good
as my tri-bander in the direction of the wire and I also am able to
do quite well off the sides of the wire especially Es at HF
frequencies.
THE ANTENNA THEORY! My theory is cut the
wire to spec, hang it up, hook it to a tuner and get after
it. The thing works great! 25 or 30 bucks (2004 prices!) and you
are in business! Good grief, did I get off on a tangent? Don't
print this the way I presented it. Some electrical genius will punch
my lights out and another DX HOG will swear that I am full of Texas
tumbleweed, tall fish tales and bull _ _ _ _ . Oh well, you know
what I mean. Fact is that 6 meters doesn't need 20 horizontal
elements at 200 feet to be able to work Es from Texas to
Florida!.......Good luck and good
DX......
KK5ID LARRY
Editors
note:
Ok Larry,
we won't print it exactly as written. Did a bit of censoring here
and there, (after all...this is a family rated web site), corrected
numerous "spellin typos", math errors, terrible use of punctuation
and Texas slang, had to completely re-draw the diagram, look up the
meanings of all those technical words you used and after all
that.......... we still left others a piece of that mouth watering
"pie crust" to chew on!
Another Editors note: Larry can be reached on his
fishing boat for questions about this project.....just start looking
on one end of Cedar Creek Lake, (38,000 acres), in East Texas and go
to the other end....somewhere in between....you'll find him looking
for that 47 pound Bass! Click
here
for a picture of his latest Texas Tall Tale
fish picture!
Have fun with Larry's fine antenna
project and pay no attention to his "theory" or these editors
notes ......N4UJW
POWERED BY HAM
RADIO!
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