11 meter rig

[Pigmeat]

The Tram Titan series is the only CB real radio men use. Unfortunately a power hungry penguiphobe industrialist has cornered the market due to the high quality of their knobs.

[Josh]

Thanks Al for getting rid of all those fugly trams.

[BDM]

Gemtronics GTX-5000. Had one of these many many moons ago (bought new), hybrid Solid & Hollow State. Receiver rejection was terrible. But, had a sexy look sort of. Would this be "Al" approved?

[Pigmeat]

Who said anything about Al? There are plenty of wealthy Penguiphobe knob hoarders around. This board doesn't revolve around Al and his antics. Sometimes I wonder about you guys.

BTW, they still make the Cobra 148 GTL. I saw one for sale at a local store last weekend for just shy of 200 bucks. I was tempted, but my wife was eyeballing me.

[BDM]

Hey now, I was forcefully instructed to always pay homage to il Duce Al, or suffer a thousand Penguin's trampling over your lower extremities for 5 days. I chose to keep our fearless leader happy instead.........

[R4002]

I've had exceptional results with a regular old half wave dipole on 11 meters.  I agree with the posters who have recommended a vertical antenna (if you have the space to put one up - it doesn't have to be anything crazy like an Antron 99, IMAX 2000, etc - a 1/2 wave or 1/4 vertical do well, a 5/8 wave vertical will do better). 

[ChrisSmolinski]

For monitoring 11m I have been using a home made active loop antenna using the LZ1AQ pre-amp. The loops are really too large for 11m (they are probably 20 or more meters in perimeter) but it still works, better than the 500 ft beverage or 670 ft sky loop 

Some activity this morning, not enough information to tell where they are from.

[skeezix]

I have a Johnson Messenger. It has one pair of HC6/U crystals in it. Where is a good place these days to get crystals for CB or other things?

[RobRich]

The skyloop probably has some serious peaks and nulls in its pattern at 27MHz.

A quarter-wave 11m-band vertical was mentioned a few posts back. That is pretty much my generic mid- to upper-HF receiving antenna for if/when my loop-on-ground starts falling off - usually above 15MHz. A 9' stainless steel vertical ground mounted over four 9' ground radials, plus a preamp if needed.

I also have a Shakespeare 318-GBT 18' "end-fed" vertical in the backyard. I say "end fed" as mine is actually ground mounted over eight 9' ground radials to better deal with feedline coupling and common mode. I had one at moderate height back in the early to mid 1990s when I was active into talking 11m DX, and I was quite satisfied with its performance. I quit the 11m hobby long ago, but I found and bought a new-old-stock 318-GBT a few years ago and installed it for upper-HF reception.

[ChrisSmolinski]

I've also considered making a half wave dipole, and hanging it vertically from a very high tree. In theory that would give me excellent low angle gain - has anyone tried this before?

[Pigmeat]

I have a Johnson Messenger. It has one pair of HC6/U crystals in it. Where is a good place these days to get crystals for CB or other things?

There's a ham who calls himself "The Crystal Man" who's good for those, and a bunch of other types. I can't recall his callsign or web addy, but I'm sure one of the boatanchor loving crystal hogs that hang out here have it.

Chris, when I was teen I used near vertical half-wave dipoles mounted at the top of a 25 ft. steel TV antenna mast for CB, one going N.E. the other west. They worked very well for TX and heard skip much earlier, up to 45 minutes, before you could hear it on stock antennas. It pissed my Uncle off to no end that I could talk nearly as much skip as he could with my 5 watts as he could with his "linyeer".

I used vertical halfwaves a bit when pirating, shooting the haul line over clear branches high in towering sycamores, but sycamores have tendency to go hollow. After a couple of "Run like Hell" incidents involving falling big branches that were rotten on the inside, I went with a 1/4 vert with an elevated ground plane. The results were about the same, plenty of other tree species would do the job, and it was a heck of a lot safer.

[RobRich]

A horizontal dipole can have decent low-angle radiation at the proper height. Think in terms of a horizontal dipole over actual ground versus free space isotropic when modeling.

That said, yeah, a vertical dipole at height should be good for local and DX as well, especially as DX signal polarization can be random after ionospheric skipping anyway. Since it is just a receving antenna, you should be able to do a basic center-fed sleeve vertical dipole with the coax exiting the bottom element. Add a small torioid or some ferrites at the exit point to help with feedine decoupling IMO.

[ThaDood]

To answer the question earlier about CB crystals? With ICM gone bye-bye, there's still Jan Crystals in Florida,     http://www.jancrystals.com/   A decade ago I called them for crystals to a 460MHz Regency old taxicab transceiver to use for my GMRS repeater. They asked me for the make and model # of what the crystal were going into, and they pulled up the data from their library of photofaxes and told me what I needed to get, and for what TX / RX FREQ's for each crystal. If they don't have the make and model #'s of the rig you have, they may request a .PDF copy of that from you to: (1.)  Determine what crystals will work for your needs. (2.) To have that info for their own library. Tid for tad.