I'm hoping to redo my antennas and I'm going to need two or three 1:1 baluns. I want to make, not buy. Which design is the best and what is the difference?

We have this one -

http://vk6ysf.com/balun_guanella_current_1-1.htm



This one -

http://vk6ysf.com/balun_1-1.htm



Then we have this -

http://sv1qzs.mppa.gr/11-50-ohm-voltage-balun-for-hf-bands/



For extra credit we have B1 on this page. I think I see how it's made, but why and what does it do the others don't?

http://www.dj0ip.de/cmc-test/the-components/the-baluns/

Is there a better one that I missed?

In for more info.  Baluns have always been a sticking point for me. 

The trick with wire-wound is to hit 50 ohm Z for the winding.  I've never gone to the trouble of trying to hit 50 ohms, so can't comment on the designs shown....

It's trouble-free to make a true broadband 1:1 Current Balun / Choke (they're the same thing by a different name) by using coax.  No issues with making a 50 ohm winding since it's already made of 50 ohm cable.  In addition, voltage / power handeling is no problem with coax.

Steve G3TXQ has a good article and guide here ===> http://vtenn.com/Blog/?p=28

What power rating are you looking for? Just make a simple RF choke (1:1 balun) out of a coax cable and a torroid ferrite core.
You can also make one out of a coax cable only, like mentioned in the post above. Just make sure it looks like a coil, not a spool. A piece of 6" PVC pipe works well for a support. Keep in mind that you may need more turns for the lower bands, especially the 160m band.

BTW, for a field expedient antenna, Sotabeams.com sells reasonably priced balun kits. They are very easy to build but only rated for 100 Watts. You can buy the core, a plastic junction box, a few connectors and a piece of teflon insulated coax ( or a regular flexible RG-8x) and build your own 1:1 choke balun very easily.



Here is a 1:1 choke balun I built from a Sotabeams kit, for my field dipoles. It took me maybe 20 minutes, at most. some simple soldering is required. If you have never done soldering, have someone teach you. It's relatively easy. Just make sure to heat the spot sufficiently to make sure you get good solder penetration. Too much heat can ruin the cable or a component you are soldering. Use some additional flux if needed. It takes some practice. I can recommend you a good soldering iron if you are interested.

I'll never have over a 100 watts. I much prefer to make anything I can instead of buy and I have everything to make couple of 1, 2 or 4 in the OP.  I just don't know why or if one would be preferred over the other. I could get the rest of the stuff for the other if it would be that much better. I don't have an antenna analyzer to play with them. For some reason the coiled coax balun just doesn't appeal to me. I'm real curious on 4 what the windings on each side of the toroid does different.

I made the 9:1 unun that's on one of my antennas now and it's worked great for the last year and a half. I just don't know what the difference is in the 1:1 baluns and which one of the designs would be preferred on a dipole and a vertical antenna (I'm hoping to have one of each).

tag because I don't understand baluns. I made an ugly balun out of 25 feet of rg58 on a 5 inch pvc pipe and it introduces a lot of inductance into the vertical antenna and changes the impedance.

It seems to work better without it.

For DIY, if memory serves, an easy  near 50 ohm transmission line I ran across while playing with 1:1 current baluns (chokes) was simply a bifilar  wrap of 12 awg stripped out of a length of romex with insulation intact. It yielded a low, pretty flat swr from 160m - 10m (swr sweep against dummy load). I think I probably wrapped  on a type 61 core.  I have one at the base of the vertical and one after the antenna switch prior to the radio.

Nick

As far as the first two examples, the first is a current balun, the second is a voltage balun.

Here is a good link to describe the differences.  https://www.dxengineering.com/techarticles/balunsandfeedlinechokes/baluns-choosing-the-correct-balun

http://www.yccc.org/Articles/W1HIS/CommonModeChokesW1HIS2006Apr06.pdf

Well, two things

1)  "Ugly Baluns" are ugly, but are rarely baluns.  I wish I could web-crawl an app that would delete all references to this particular steaming pile of bad ham-web-lore design.  At best, "ugly baluns" are narrow band devices, useful on only 1 perhaps 2 bands, and can make matters worse, as you are probably seeing

From the link and chart posted above, you can see narrow-band "ugly baluns" on the graph (aka "air-core)....

2) Proper baluns don't add inductance.  However, they do change the impedance by a) extra feedline length transforming the impedance and b) choking common-mode currents (if they exist) which changes feedpoint impedance.

Not sure how you determine if it works better or not, but putting in a real balun/choke is almost always a better idea than one of those ugly thangs.  Extrapolating from the chart, it looks like the 25 ft x 5 inch "ugly" might have some useful common-mode rejection somewhere in the 10 to 15 MHz range, but not very useful elsewhere....

But really, if you have a good radial system, a choke is usually not needed.  I have 4 Inverted-L's here, with various radial systems, and none of them measure with any significant common-mode current, and a choke/balun would make no difference in performance.  It would just change the impedance a bit because of the additional feedline length.



Note the good ferrite broadband 1:1 current baluns/chokes at top, and the not-very-useful narrow-band air-core "ugly baluns" at the bottom ===>

The toroids I have are FT140-43 which are big enough for 100 watts. I ASSUME that a current balun with bifilar windings like the first example on my OP should get me somewhere in the ball park of what I want? I don't have any small coax but I have plenty of the wire I made the 9:1 out of and since it's still working after a year and a half the wire I used couldn't have been that bad a choice.

Not exactly sure why you're quoting me here - but just to make sure there's no misunderstanding, by "ugly balun" I mean the thingies found on the web that are wound out of coax on usually a PVC form.... I am not referring to the bifilar windings....  The bifilar type on a FTnnn43 core should be fine, as others above have described.

In regard to # of turns and core type vs. frequency coverage, the links and chart above are fine whether you're using bifilar wound wire or coax windings.

Here is some good reading on baluns.

http://k9yc.com/RFI-Ham.pdf

http://k9yc.com/CoaxChokesPPT.pdf

So would the 11 turns on the FT240-52 torrid core be the way to go for the most effective wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am choke?  Those videos from OH2FFY look like a project I can handle.  Would like to replace the "ugly balun" that I've been using.  

What about using the same mix 52 in a series of snap-on chokes?  Would they offer just as much effectiveness as a wound torrid?

The reason it's changing it, is that your antenna is using the coax shield for a counterpoise. You need a better ground plane/counterpoise.

That's one of the best guides out there. You absolutely want a choking impedance of >1k Ohms.

Which leads to one of my biggest bitches about commercial "baluns." I can't seem to recall much in the way of specifications in the commercial balun sales information.

"Handles 1,000 Watts!"

"Good to the Legal Limit!"

On what bands? What's the effective impedance per band? You want HOW much money for that thing?

Two of my buddies have extremely expensive tactical ham radio antennas, the brand of which I won't mention here, but both "baluns" on their antennas are a joke.

Something to really consider is your actual need in power handling. It's a lot easier to get very high performance at the 100~200 watt power level than if you genuinely need 1500 watt power handling.

And even at the 1500 watt level, there would seem to be better ways to do things than the commonly encountered hamstuff way.