POTA PERFormer
Parks On The Air has become an incredibly popular activity for ham radio. It involves mobile operating at a park and trying to make 10 contacts to "activate" the park entity (putting the park on the air.) The quest to have easily deployable, mobile antennas that are also effective has likewise grown in popularity.
Enter: The POTA PERFormer antenna. It is a Portable, Elevated, Resonant antenna designed by Greg, KJ6ER. You can email Greg directly for a copy of the plans for this antenna. Michael, KB9VBR built this antenna and put it on YouTube:
Now if you don't have a whip antenna but would still like to try this build, it can be made from wire. It'll be monoband but you can cut band specific emitters and tuned radials for desired bands. (This is where an adjustable whip would be advantageous). You'll also need a mast or a tree to hang the antenna at the appropriate height.
The heart of this build is the center connection. An SO-239 is bolted to a PVC pipe connector. The coax center is brought up through the PVC via a piece of enamel wire to the top to a stainless machine screw while the grounds are also connected to machine screws but they stay inside the PVC fitting.
From there, the center emitter and 2 tuned, elevated radials are simply alligator clipped to the machine screws. The driven emitter goes up to the top of the mast, the tuned radials come out at 90° to the driven. The two radials can be "directed" if less than 180° from each other. This will provide gain in that direction. If they are left at 180° the antenna will be omnidirectional much like any other vertical.
It is recommended to have the center connection hub and tuned radials around 5' above the ground/surface of the planet. This build utilized plastic garden/electric fence stakes to hold up the radials and they were maybe 40" high and performance was still very good. This incarnation was built for the 20m band. Emitter and radials were cut to ~16'6" and tuned to suit.
The SWR as measured on the IC705 radio had the entire band under 1.5:1!
A 1:1 choke at the feed point would be an improvement to this design to isolate the coax from radiating.
Thanks for checking out this build!
VE5REV 73!