10/11 meters with my RV

[Highlander_821]

Hi all. It's been a minute since I've been on here. A tornado in 2019 wiped out all my antennas. I decided at the time to invest the insurance money that I got for them into my flight simulation hobby and mothball my equipment for a while.

My wife and I are going to retire and become full-time RV dwellers. I want to get back into radio a bit, so I have ordered a Radioddity QT-80. I figured I would start with 10-15 meters and see how it goes.

I don't intend to operate mobile much if at all - the RV is a 32 foot class A and I find driving it safely requires all my attention on what I am doing, and the noise in the cockpit is kind of loud, which would make it a little unpleasant to have to have the radio volume up high enough to overcome that. I want to operate once I get to whatever campsite we are at. There is easy access to the coach batteries for the power connection that I will need, so I just need to figure out antenna. I don't think there is any suitable surface on the roof for a magmount, so I am thinking about using a 102 inch whip and mounting it on the ladder on the back of the RV with one of those vice-grip mounts (and removing it when we go to leave the campground and hit the road).

Any thoughts, concerns, suggestions? Thanks!

 

[Crawdad]

One popular idea is to attach a fiberglass push-up mast to the RV to elevate a multi-band wire or vertical of some type. Max-Gain, DXEngineering, GigaParts and many more offer this type of mast.

7 3

 

[AudioShockwav]

Hello Highlander, it's been a few minutes since we had seen you, hope life is treating you well.

73
Jeff

 

[Highlander_821]

So I decided against a 102 inch whip. With shipping, I was looking at $85 to $90. I got a Wilson Trucker 2000 with the 10" shaft from Walmart for $53. I used a single channel mount and a heavy duty quick disconnect to mount it to the top of the RV ladder. I am using a 30' length of RG8X coax.

Initial SWR checks showed terrible SWR, and I also had no idea that the 10" shaft was part of the radiator on the antenna. I wanted the longer shaft to get the antenna up above the roof of the RV a little more. This put the bottom of the SWR curve at around 25.5!! Why would anyone ever want to use the longer shaft if they were running 11 meters??!! I had to cut the whip down by several inches to get back into the range I bought the antenna to use.

But that wasn't the only problem. Seemingly, the ladder itself was not enough counterpoise for the antenna (not bonded to the chassis of the vehicle) so I added three 102" wires to the mount and taped them down on the roof as spread out as was practical. So now I have a good SWR curve, with all of CB plus 10 meters up to about 29.0 below 2:1 with a 1:1 match right around 28.0. Definitely not the most wideband antenna I've ever used, but whatever.

On air tests are pretty disappointing. Playing on the SSB channels 36-40 I have gotten just a couple of quick contacts, but it ain't no pile-up buster for sure. I haven't had contact with anyone beyond a couple of transmissions before I get blasted out by someone else in my region. Freeband was about the same. I had to really flog it to get just a couple cursory replies and that was that. I found a QSO up on 28.430, and I got a quick reply from one station but he said I was pretty weak and was not getting much audio from me. All around kind of a letdown TBH.

For an 80 watt radio and what is supposed to be a decent antenna, I am underwhelmed. Also a bummer to find out there doesn't seem to be anyone local on the AM channels anymore. Haven't heard anyone on the former "home" channels, and I have called out multiple times to see if anyone is monitoring. Just dead static.

Maybe once I get out on the road and in various campgrounds I will find other locals to chat with and maybe find better propagation conditions.

*Sad Trombone*

 

[Highlander_821]

On the plus side, The Radioddity QT-80 is a cool little rig. Eventually, we plan to buy a house, and with a nice base station vertical or a small beam, this will be a fun rig to have.

They have a bundle sale where you get the radio and a couple of trinkets for 259 plus shipping. One of the additional items is a nifty little heatsinking stand. The speaker they throw in sounds worse than the internal speaker on the radio, and the rubber ducky magmount antenna is silly. But $50 off regular price is pretty decent. I also put it on a Paypal credit card and got a $50 credit, so I paid about 220 for the rig. I think that's a great value.

 

[Crawdad]

Be aware that your Wilson-plus-wires antenna is going to be somewhat directional in the direction of your GP wires, both Rx and TX. So when you park your RV things might depend on how it's pointed.

A nearly 2MHz wide <2.0 SWR bandwidth is actually pretty good in my experience.