My Lightning 6 Quad antenna

Sweeeeet!

 

Bet your neighbors like you...LOL

 

Great setup Drifter and looks even better. Can you confirm for me about the positions of the ver/hor feed points? The typical quad has the vertical fed at the 3:00 or 9:00 and the horizontal usually at the 6 o'clock position, but I think it is the opposite with the L6. I have an idea why that is, but I would like your opinion and if you found that confusing at first look? I have never owned a Signal Engineering quad, but would love to play a tune on that one.

How say you?

Give us some words about your success at tuning this monster and how she performs even considering conditions may not be the best right now.

Thanks for your input.

Marconi

 

Drifter -

Your pictures promote maximum jealousy !!!

- unit 399

 

Nice tower and antenna. Looks like an old Tristao or an earlier U.S. Tower.

When you put that quad exactly 90 degrees away from a signal is the rejection really good?

Next project could be to put a bunch of 2 meter quad elements on the same boom

 

And what has me puzzled, because I don't see what it's feeding, and you don't see it very often anyway, is what are you feeding with the ladder line?
- 'Doc

 

HI HI

AP

 

I just put up a super hawk, the 2 element signal engineering antenna and you are right the feeding is opposite of what it should be. I put this thing together and i still cant figure out why it is like this. It is really confusing but the antenna works very well.

 

Wow! That is sexy!

 

Thanks KJ4BAE, IMO the difference is due to the SE being a voltage fed antenna where the wire is continuous while the traditional quads are current fed and have the resonant wire joined together at an insulator. Your SuperHawk tuner is a bit different in design compared to Drifter’s L4+ or L6, because your SH’s boom is not long enough to appear as a resonant ground element for the feeder to work against, so SE adds this floating ground side wire parallel to the open ended feeder. IMO, this is a very efficient feeder that transitions the impedance very smoothly from the coax end directly into the radiator---transforming the high impedance radiator to that of the feed line, while this is basically end feeding a resonant ½ wave element. The other half of the quad also contributes to the radiation of any quad design, but that is difficult for me to describe.

Thanks for the confirmation Drifter. I believe you when you describe the interference issues you noticed in your yard. I tried to install my Long John 5 element at my location and I was never able to get a reasonable tune even tuning about 25’ high on a 18’ roof deck on my home. The antenna was overly sensitive to everything within 40’ - 50’ feet. Maybe if I could have raised it up to 40’ feet or more it would have worked fine. I ended up putting my 4 element back up and did not have the problem.

Can you describe for us what the new power upgrade is? This must be something new from SE.