Tried the radio this morning to see if I could bag any dx in the All Asia contest. It seemed that 20m was in better shape than 40m and unfortunately my only antennas at the moment are an 80m doublet and a quarter wave GP for 40m. The GP was performing better than the doublet for DX but wasn't resonant for 20m. I decided to whip up a 20m vertical dipole on a 10m fishing rod in the back garden.
I tried comparing the main 40m GP with the 20m Vdipole but as usual I found too many different cases where one would outperform the other and then on the next stn the situation would reverse so no real conclusions. Also the 40m GP was 20m away from the house and the vertical dipole was 10m away from the house. The 40m GP was therefore less noisy than the Vdipole. On some occasions though the Vdipole was 3-4 S points better than the 40m GP.
I think the Vdipole will be very useful for IOTA as it is extremely easy to setup and performed reasonably well.
Managed to work 8 JAs, 1 HS0 and a VU within 2 hours with it, so the experiment was well worthwhile.
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