Project TouCans First Vertical Antenna Spots

Project TouCans went vertical this morning!

Well, almost vertical. Listening to the Ham Radio Work Bench podcast, KO6BTY and I are frequently regaled with tales of carbon fiber pole mending for the casts vertical quarter-wave antennas. It finally got to be too much and I ordered a carbon fiber pole of my own. It was one of these guys .

It arrived yesterday. I haven't had time to get it out of the box yet, but after doing an antenna repair this morning, I found myself with a rig with an almost vertical quarter wave and a radial reaching down and along the ground.

I went ahead and keyed. The rig only sounded a little bit sick: vs the SWR mismatch I'm assuming. I checked out the reverse beacon network and low and behold! Signal was reaching most of the same spotting stations. Some of the stations even had more signal strength than they had reported with the antenna more closely approximating a horizontal half-wave dipole! Here are the results per station:

The graph needs some work, but I can see a few things. Generally, the vertical orientation did worse, but like I said, there were SWR issues and ground was very, very dry.

For reference, here's the antenna orientation

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