I put up a new antenna; the MFJ-1795. It’s a nice antenna, for people with limited space. It is 3.5 meters long, the big HF antennas are 7 meters long or more. So I’m playing in the minor league when it comes to antennas!

Anyway, already 2 of my HAM radio friends asked me; “is it a coat hanger or an antenna ?”.  Although it sounds a bit offensive, I cannot totally disagree with them! 😉

The antenna wasn’t easy to tune. It works on 4 bands and all 4 bands need to be tuned separately. In the end you need to keep tuning and retuning all bands until you’re happy.

I also wasn’t impressed with how you need to connect the coax cable to the antenna. The core needs to be soldered and the outside needs to be connected to ground (see picture). It somehow gives me a feeling that it’s not connected ok.

In the end all is tuned and working ok. I made some nice contacts with it, Indonesia, Costs Rica, South America, North America, Saudi Arabia  etc… etc… All with only 100 watts, from my location in the Netherlands.

The rain can throw the tuning of quite a bit though. I need to think what i can do about that. Probably a grounding problem, but I will figure this out in the future!

For now I will only use it when it’s not raining! 😉

Some pics:

The Coat Hanger Antenna

The top of the antenna; 16 coat spaces

The feed point; a soldered piece of coax

The bottom of the antenna.