Over the past 20 years, I’ve built and used the following antennas: T2FD, K9AY, Flag, Ewe, random wires and horizontal dipoles. For me, it’s hard to beat the horizontal dipole’s performance and simplicity if you’re mainly interested in a particular band. Presently the only antennas I have up are dipoles, cut for the bands I primarily DX.
If you don’t have any antenna building experience, try the dipole or longwire first; better yet build them both, and try them out side-by-side and see which you will prefer. Most likely you will find neither one superior to the other, and that they may even complement each other. And that’s when the fun begins, as you keep experimenting, trying to find that one “super antenna”.
For the longwire, I recommend you feed it with coax, through an impedance matching isolation transformer, as this will greatly reduce your noise pickup. Bruce Conti has an excellent tutorial on the construction of these transformers. I’ve built several for DXers using the Rubbermaid baby food container as the housing, and this has made the difference between hearing mostly noise to logging some real DX:
http://www.bamlog.com/diyxfmr.htmAnother tip for reducing noise is to use RF chokes to sanitize your coax as described here by John Bryant:
http://www.dxing.info/equipment/coax_leadin_bryant.pdf
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