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Homemade 10-Meter Antennas

The 10-meter band is a favorite ham hangout, commanding a wide range of homemade antennas from simple dipoles to mobile whips and horizontal yagis. Amateur radio antenna craft is like taking a trip into a sci-fi gallery lined with "cobras," "MoXoN" rectangles, the 10-meter dipole using velocity factor of coaxial cable to reduce antenna size, the Sterba curtain antenna for all HF bands, the double bazooka antenna and our DIY of choice for field day, the 10-meter cubical quad.

The Quad Antenna at WA6CDO
- Jordan Boucher, WA6CDO San Francisco, California, built a 10-meter cubical quad antenna for only a few dollars and reports logging 776 contacts in the first five months of operation using an HTX-10, 25 watts peak on SSB.
  
  Construction uses a center spider rather than a boom, making the antenna a series of triangles. This adds rigidity and mechanical strength to the antenna. Spreaders are rough redwood. He used 6-foot bundles of bamboo from a local hardware store for the spiders. Mono-filament fishing line was used to tie the reflector and driven elements together. This makes the entire box rigid.
  
  Assembly of the quad loops were completed on a garage floor. Dimensions are from the ARRL Antenna Handbook. He fine-tuned the antenna after it was mounted on an antenna rotor with an SWR analyzer. Then the reflector and driven element were trimmed. No other attempt was made to Max gain or F/B ratio. The feed is a quarter-wave of 75 ohm coax coiled into a choke balun. The feedline is RG 8X 52 ohm. This gave a low SWR very close to 1.1 @ 28.4 mHz.

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