I recently purchased a really nice TS-440SAT from MTC, right now I am waiting on my power supply (Astron SS-25).  I settled on a 25 amp because it was in my budget range and figured it should do the job until I upgrade to a larger one and or add a 2m rig to my shack.  I am going to "make" a dipole with my limited knowledge, I am going to use it in my attic for now until I can string up a G5RV in my trees.  How do I assemble this dipole? I'd like to use it on multiple bands but realize it may not be possible, below is a pictures of my radio and stuff I have for an antenna.

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With a little extra wire (okay, more than 2x the original amount of wire for a single dipole), you can make a fan dipole and have access to any band you wish!



Basically, you will construct a dipole for every band you will be using, and use a common support and feedline. Note that only half the dipole is shown in the picture, for clarity; the other half mirrors that shown in the picture.

another pic, this of a portable fan dipole used as an inverted Vee:

 


 

Don't see why not. One thing to consider about them though is that the various elements may interact, making the final tune up a little hard.

I think I have enough wire for now to do that, will 16awg or 14awg speaker wire work ok or should I go with something different?  I should be ok using a 25amp power supply for basic HF stuff correct?

Do you have room in the attic for a 40 Meter dipole (~67') ? It will also work in 15 Meters. You could add a 20 Meter dipole(~33') beneath it and have three of the most popular ham bands available.

The ends of the dipole can be bent to make it fit if necessary. You can use electric fence insulators to stand the dipole elements off from the rafters.

As far as power supplies, 25 Amps will power both the 440 and a 2 meter/70 cm rig since you won't be transmitting on both at the same time.

 

Oh, well, in that case you'll want to ad an element for 30 Meters!

Here's one web site to get you started: http://www.aa5tb.com/dipole.html

Am I good to go using speaker wire?  I think the coax I have is RG8U.

This guy has a balun in the cente of his fan dipole. He also has several connectors, one for each band.



I too have used a 40 meter dipole for 15 meters; in fact I used it for my first HF CW contact, with a guy in Nagasaki, Japan! I was in Los Angeles.

A dipole will radiate on its fudamental frequency, and also on every odd multiple of the fundamental. So at 7 MHz (40 meters) your dipole will resonate on 21 MHz (15 meters).

Here's someone with a similar setup, with more construction details:



.





Quoted from his site:


Link to his site:

eta Indoors, you should be GTG with speaker wire.

Speaker wire will do just fine in the attic.

More about building dipoles. This is worth printing out and saving. Notice the little trick with capacitance hats at the end of the last page for making the 40/15 Meter dipole have a very low SWR without a tuner.

 

FAN dipole is superior to a G5RV.

Do that first and heck with the G5RV.

<-----operates on a G5RV all the time and wishes he had a better fan dipole setup.

Fuck a G5RV.

Tell me how you really feel.

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I'll go along with the G5RV hate.

I bought a G5RV kit, tried it in place of my W2AU/W2VS 5 band trap dipole and few weeks (and some missed DX) later, it was transformed into a ladder-line fed dipole for Field Day use.

When you put up the outside antenna, consider the ladder-line fed dipole. There are a couple of easily-overcome quirks about feed line length, but with a tuner having balanced output capability, it makes an excellent antenna. If your rig has an internal tuner, you may be able to use a 4:1 balun. Just remember that most internal tuners lack the wide range of stand-alone units, especially on 160, 80, and 40 Meters. The only reason I'm not using one is I don't have a practical way to get the ladder line from the outside of the house into my shack.

Ladder line fed dipole article.

Just giving it to ya straight. I have G5RV on my list with HT and magnet mount. All are good solutions in a very narrow environment. But in reality they don't work for the vast majority of uses and I refuse to recommend them.

My first antenna was a G5RV. Never made a single QSO on it.

Yahoo! - 403 - Forbidden

I currently have a fan dipole in my attic that covers 10/20/30
I dropped the money on an antenna analyzer to make the job of tuning easier and it was worth every penny.
So far it has worked great I'm at about 110 DX entities in a little over 2 months of using it.
I would do it again in a heartbeat, but the analyzer really is a nice tool to have when building antennas.
I feed mine directly with 75' of RG-8X ... No balun, no tuner, etc.
I bought a few end insulators, a center insulator, and some 14ga wire from Lowes. I kept it from touching anything with 550 and tried to keep the legs as straight as possible.
The 40m legs have a sharp bend at the end to make them fit, but it works great on 40 so I guess it isn't hurting things too much.

I just ordered a lot more coax (and have recently upgraded my station ground) and plan to run a vertical and OCFD outside to see the difference and add some bands, but that is a long-term summer project. For now the attic dipole is working great and I get good reports.

Is RG8X fairly thin?

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Yes.
It has an outside diameter of 0.242 vs 0.405. Loss over the run inside my house isn't a concern and it is very easy to work with.

I have a ton of contacts on my G5RV, but the moxon eats its lunch.

I need to get the moxon array up 20/15/10, also planning a big 40m moxon that will be able to flip East/West.

What did you do for a center insulator?

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Go here http://www.arrl.org/ and in the keyword search window at the top of the page, type "Antenna here is a dipole".

There are other less expensive option as, but I just ordered one of these. It has been vey easy to work with.

http://www.hamradio.com/detail.cfm?pid=H0-005111

I might try and make a center insulator myself, I have an extra SO-239. Do I solder one wire to the center of the connector and the other wire to something else?

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I made a 10m dipole yesterday and hooked my radio to the car to test it out and I couldn't hear anything.  I don't know if I didn't have the knobs turned the right way but I couldn't hear any audio.

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Had a similar thing happen to my Yaesu 901, lo, these many years ago. I just wanted to listen to 10 meters. Got very low white noise, no signals at all.

Turned out I had the band switch set to 80 meters.

Squelch set too high?
Set on FM?

Yeh, definitely check the setting of the squelch control ("SQL").

At the risk of throwing some more poo in the fan, you might also consider the "Carolina Windom" Off-Center-Fed Dipole  -


(40-10 meter version shown)

Has several advantages:

1. Multi-band
2. Compact (fits nicely in an attic)
3. Doesn't require separate radiator wires for each band
4. Low SWR (doesn't require an antenna tuner)

I went the expensive but easy route since I am hard pressed for spare time. Alpha Delta DX-EE. 10 through 40 and fits perfectly in my attic which is 41'8". Still working on an 80m solution. Thinking a thin wire house or roof wrap. The DX-EE tunes fine and has flat SWR. Haven't made too many  contacts with it yet as it has only been hooked up for about a week. They also sell the center insulator to roll your own. For an attic installation you aren't going to do much better for multi band coverage than a fan dipole.

pic of the front of your radio as it sits now?

http://www.hamuniverse.com/ is your friend.

On the left, click Antenna Design.

Just keep looking there, you'll find good, easy to build, practical antennas.

For a dipole one leg connects to the center of the coax, the other to the shield.  

I like the Jetstream center insulator.  Inexpensive, very rugged.  These items will serve you well:  I keep several
of the Jetstream center insulators and at least a dozen of these end insulators in my "antenna stuff foot locker"
at all times.  That's my stash of materials and parts to make antennas.

http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/antsup/5524.html    Jetstream Center Insulator

http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/antsup/4818.html    Plastic End Insulator - very rugged

Indoors, speaker wire is fine.  Anything from 12 ga to 20 ga will work at up to 100 watts.  Indoors, attic, stranded insulated 14 ga THHN is excellent.  For outdoors, and for any portable antenna, I recommend insulated stranded 14 ga MTW ("Machine Tool Wire") because it is not as stiff as THHN and does not tend to coil and pull a kink.  The insulation is more UV resistant than THHN.  Worth the few pennies difference per foot.

Unless running an amp, RG-8X is probably the sweet spot in HF coax.  The most bang for the buck.

I actually got some audio from the rig today, I believe it was 80m (3.000 or something) that was with my 10m dipole strung up in the basement.

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Where do you order your wire from Jupiter?

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http://www.wireandsupply.com/product_p/mtw-16g.htm   <--might be good for portable / backpack antennas

http://www.wireandsupply.com/product_p/mtw-14g.htm   <--what I usually order - 14 ga

http://www.wireandsupply.com/product_p/mtw-12g.htm   <--overkill

try 5, 10, 15 and see what you get

also 6.0 will usually be strong in the evening

What mhz is that?

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This is really nice antenna wire:

http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/cable/polystealth.html

5.000 mhz
10.000 mhz
15.000 mhz
or 6.000 mhz

sorry

The one antenna that I DIY'd is based around a Balun design 1:1 choke affixed to a 18" polyethylene kitchen cutting board. Elements for 75/40/20 spaced by 6" along the vertical axis of the board. Each conductor is connected by a bus of cable that terminates at the center insulator. The system isn't any longer in use as currently I don't have the space, but when it was in operation, it more than satisfied my expectation.

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The interaction thing is highly overtalked.  Tune the lowest band first, then the next higher band, etc.  Not a big deal.

In the basement? You need a little altitude for that dipole to work.

I know i need to move it to higher ground.  I only have 18ft of coax and am trying to make do with what I have. I plan on ordering more coax and some 12awg on Thursday and making a fan dipole.

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If you are getting signal in the basement, then you are on the right track.

With good things headed your way



 

Such a fan dipole will not only work those bands, but the other HF bands with a tuner.  My fan dipole is cut for those three bands, but I can easily work 60, 17, 15, 12, and 10 m with tuner.  Of course, can't work 160 m, but that's not a problem.

I am going to order some rg8x and 150 ft of antenna wire and try my hand at making a fan dipole.

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Also... let's get you listening.

M-F evenings, try 3.916 mhz starting about 8 pm Central.  That's the "Tailgaters" out of the northern Texas area, a sort of ragchew with the "net control" position passed around very informally.  "Why don't you take the net for a while so I can help my kids with homework."  Many of them are running QRO so you should be able to hear them.  

Beginning at 10 pm, same frequency, the "Freewheeler's Net".  They are a more formal net, and many up in your area.

On Sunday, Tues, Thurs evenings, 8 to 10 pm Central, the Hifivers Net on 3.908 mhz.  Operators in the Texas and Louisiana area, and checkins from all over, including MO.  You should be able to hear them just fine.  

On M-W-F, you should be able to pick up the SETXAC Net (pronounced "see-tak net") also on 3.908 mhz beginning about 8 pm Central.  This is the South East Texas Amateur Club  which hold technical discussions on amps, antennas, and other subjects.  Some of the same net controls and checkins as the Hifivers Net.

During the day, dial around between 7.200 and 7.300 mhz.  I'm sure you'll find some hams.  Also, during the day, try 14.300 mhz.  As a SWL I really enjoyed listening to the late Bob Golder on the Maritime Mobile Service Network passing traffic for ships at sea.   www.mmsn.org   The same frequency is the Pacific Seafarers' Net.  14300.net/netinfoa.htm  and  www.14300.net.

Remember, even though no ham or ham net "own" a frequency, 14.300 mhz has been a long established frequency for maritime emergency nets.  If you don't have business there, please don't transmit on, or within 3 khz of 14.300 mhz.  But listening is interesting.  I think most hams would agree it would not be "good amateur practice" to interfere with operations on 14.300 mhz by calling CQ and taking the frequency between nets.

And finally, http://kb4gsx.tripod.com/  the Awful Awful Ugly Net.  Named for founder KB5AAU.  Most of these guys and gals run some horsepower and should be easily heard in MO.  3.855 mhz 8 pm Central.  "Remember you don't have to be awful awful ugly, you don't have to be ugly, you can be pretty or think you are and you can still check in."