G5RV Antenna

The next part of my antenna erecting project was to look at an antenna for HF, particularly for 10 metres with the sunspot maximum. Now my history of HF antennas has been very limited. The present antenna is a very short long wire which doubles back on itself fed with a long piece of coax. Last week I did a lot of research on dipoles and baluns, I also did some measuring in the back garden to see what length of antenna I could get away with. When I did the measurements I realised that I could just fit a half-size G5RV antenna. The half-size G5RV is a dipole with two 26.5 feet top and fed with 16 feet of 300 ohm ribbon cable. This then connects with a so-239 socket to any length of 50 ohm coax. I decided to try it out and take down the old antenna!

I sent for the G5RV kit from e-bay which arrived almost the next day! First a trip to Modern Radio to get some RG58u coax and some pl-259 plugs then out came the ladders!

So, after putting up the new antenna the question going around in my head was 'Will it work on all bands?' This antenna is only designed to use from 40m - 10m bands, maybe it will be useless on 80m and 160m. I also read about other people having problems tuning this antenna.

When I finally wired it up and connected it to the Yaesu FT-817 through the MFJ-945E tuner I was totally blown away!!

I could hear things that I could only dream of with the old longwire!

The dipole centre with the ribbon cable attached.

The ATU (Aerial Tuning Unit) did it's stuff perfectly giving me an almost 1:1 SWR on all the bands including 160m and 80m. On some bands it didn't even need the ATU, it was aready resonant, particularly the 40m band. I am very pleased with it...now I want to try to work some stuff on 10 metres.