The new SARA multi-band fan dipole has been built and deployed for some initial tuning and testing!
For Field Day 2019, SARA will be deploying at tri-band fan dipole on 20m, 40m, and 80m. On May 31st, Gary AA8CS, Jeff W8TB, and John N8CD came over to Jason N8JDM’s house to raise and tune the antenna. Using Jason’s military-style pole mast, the antenna was raised to 40ft to match the height of the Field Day installation. The guy wires for the military mast made the test deployment a bit more challenging than the real day will be, but the team stuck it out and was able to run some tests.
After trimming some wire from the 80m wires and, surprisingly, adding a bit to the 40m wires, the antenna was acceptable in tune for Field Day. The antenna covers most of the 20m and 40m bands with at least a 2:1 SWR and the 80m phone segment (75m) with 2:1 SWR.
The center support is a 2.5″ PVC pipe with all legs of the antenna terminated onto a central line connected to a 1:1 balun. The spacing of the legs is 6″ to match the “SRI” fan dipole design. Each end is kept 38″ apart from the other legs via bototom-weighted 0.5″ PVC pipe, again to match the “SRI” specs. The legs then must be pulled out as far as possible to hit a wider angle for the inverted V design.
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