So not to clutter up GCW's thread anymore...

The clothes line reels have been on my purchase list for a long time. With a FL trip coming up soon, I'm hoping to do at least a little operating while I'm near all that salt water. I have the KX3, a new homebrew 4:1 balun or un-un, (not sure which) and the 20ft crappie pole. I have some wire for the antenna, but it's solid core and hard to deal with. I had most of a spool of 24ga speaker wire left over from another project, probably 40-45ft. It will have to do.

Another thing that I've never liked about the ones I've seen is that they all assume that the lines are to the center and the reels go out to the ends. What if I want to keep the reels in the center and have the line go out to the support, whether it's a tree or a pole or something. On to the pictures!!!

All the pieces laid out. You can see how the orange part is a simple reel and the off-white shell just comes apart and holds the reel in place.



Here's the center of the reel and how the string is retained. I want to be able to feed the other side of the wire out of the center of the reel for access.



So my solution is to drill a hole in the center where the sticker goes and feed the wire through it.



Here's the end of the wire with a tie around a loop to try and hold it in place. I don't think this is going to work well.



All spooled up and ready to go with access to both ends of the wire.



Pic of the inside with 40+ ft of 24ga wire. This is a good example of how the wire will roll on the spool in the case. You can probably get another 10+ ft on it if you're OCD with the spooling.



Both spooled up and ready for testing. Did I mention there's a storm about to roll through? I'm up in the air on whether I want to put connectors on the ends or just leave them bare. Both the balun and the BNC-wire thing  for the KX3 can handle with wire or a banana plug.

Good idea, sburggsx.  Like the way you accessed both ends of the wire.  
Have you used it yet in that config?

Yes, I played with it for a little while this evening while the storm was rolling in. I pulled out the full length on one reel and attached it to the top of the crappie pole and stretched the wire out in a very loose sloper.  The second reel I extended about 3/4 length and laid it on the ground under the other wire. (I didn't take a picture of this part)  Starting on 20m I hit tune and instantly got signals on the KX3. The 13 colony stations were a great  beacon to play with. Since I was trying this out for the first time, I didn't write anything down but I wasn't happy with the SWR readings. I think I was able to get to 1.0:1 on 20m but some other bands it was way higher. I put the new balun/unun thing in line and got really good readings where I wasn't before. I'm pretty sure 20m was better without it though. I gave in and purchased KX3 Companion, so I can do some better tests later.

I threw my call out on the 40m K2J station for a while, but to hear him I had to have the volume cranked up near 30 where on 20m I had it about 8. On top of that the batteries were low so I was only throwing out 3 watts.

Another problem is the fact the wire pulls the reels off the table. I need a way to anchor them.

**** SIDE NOTE*****

Seriously, I had the volume cranked. It took me a min to realize that if this had been my other radio I would have been deaf with noise. The KX3 amazes me every time I play with it. I shouldn't have been hearing anything.

***** /NOTE *****

The storm was getting closer so I broke down all the antenna pieces to be safe. I wasn't done yet though. I pulled out my power supply and hooked up the G5RV in a desperate attempt to get one of the K2's in the log. What this did was give me a quick comparison on the performance of my yo-yos. They didn't suck, but the 40m station came up out of the noise as did all the people calling him. On 20m the difference was much less noticeable.

More to come. As always, I took at least one picture. I hope these don't bother people.

I like the concept, but would the fact you have wire wound around the reels provide a loading coil or some other electrical effect on the rest of your wire? My understanding is if you do it with the reels out at the ends, the wound wire largely cancels itself out electrically, is the same if you do it with the wire at the base? I'd be curious what you would see if you hooked it up to an antenna analyzer.

Interesting point here, technically having the coils at the end of the antenna is most efficient. They work on the other configurations but "End Loading" is the best. 73, Rob

No, the end of the wire that comes out of the reel should go to a center insulator... and the reel ends up at the end of the wire.

tie off<----o---------------------------O------------------------------o------>tie off


So, paracord on the ends, tied to the reels, for tie off, and a center insulator where the coax is connected.

Yeah, thats the normal config, the OP is doing this if I understand correctly, hence my question


tie off<------/-----------------------------OVO-------------------------/------>tieoff

V goes to radio, O's are the reels / are insulators.

Look at whats going on in his picture.

Is there anyway to have the wire come out of the other side? To me the crank handle could interfere.

i support these two posts.  


ar-jedi

You'll gain at least 5dB by adding handles to that KX3.

So my take on what you are doing is a hockmere version of this:



More info

The way I see it, and I may well be wrong,  your "coils" i.e. your spools of wire will vary randomly based on the length of your dipole with shorter lengths being more loaded, also the winding pattern will not good since its just randomly spooled on there so the inductance if any would vary each time you deployed it.

Anyhow, its an interesting idea, I'm just not sure if what I'm bringing up is actually true or not.

But I don't WANT to do it that way.


The only time the "coils" come into play is when you do not have the wire fully extended. So far I haven't played with different lengths at a given frequency. I will get there at some point.