Moxon 2.1 Is On the Air!

Antenna weather returned to South Texas just as previously advertised. I got an early start this morning and fiorst took down the EFHW antenna which was gathering some WSPR data on 20m. I made the 20m WSPR Challenge board yesterday at #88 with 188 unique spots.

Once the EFHW was stowed away I tried best as I could to straighten out the aluminum angle I use as a support for the mast. It’s better but still needs a bit of work. I re-installed the Spiderpole and set the new mast clamps, guy ring and Moxon hub. First issue was that none of the mast clamps were the right size. Not sure what happened there but I had to take them all off. The guy ring and hub worked fine. Next up was installing the pole adapters into the fishing pole spreaders. These tuned out to fit much tighter than I had anticipated and I had to pound them in a bit to fully seat. It may be the outer sleeves I added to the fishing pole ends may work a bit to well. I then installed each of the poles in the hub and placed a screw to hold them in. One adapter would not fully seat but I left it in as it was plenty tight. I extended the fishing poles to full length and added the wire clamps to each pole. Next was placing the wires in place. I had previously measured each wire and added a cable tie to mark the appropriate position. This is where it gets interesting as adjusting the wires also creates tension on the poles. This time I opted not to use Kevlar string for added support and let the antenna wire do the tensioning. Here is the antenna after these bits were completed:

A quick test on the antenna analyzer showed things generally in band and this improved when I further adjusted the wire clamps. I will likely need to open up the holes in the wire clamps for more adjustment range. I put in my hard hat and sent the antenna up to about 9m and guyed it down:

Here are the SWR and Impedance plots once this was fully deployed:

So the antenna deployed well and initial checks looked good. I went into the shack and found little SSB activity on 15m. I called CQ and was answered by a station in Michigan who reported me S9+10 on 100W. We talked for a bit and then I switched over to FT8 and generally found good signals into Europe as before. The arc in the image below is basically centered on the heading I have the antenna pointed to.:

I am currently running WSPR and collecting spot data. Looks like the antenna is working pretty much as expected. One area I’ll like experiment with is the use of the tension lines and I may need to modify the wire clamps a bit. Overall happy with the results so far.