Because my home is located in a severely antenna-restricted area, most of my High-Frequency (HF) on-air activities in the past two decades have been outdoors. Fortunately, I live in the San Francisco Bay area where we have many good days throughout the year to enjoy all kinds of outdoor activities, including operating ham radio. Designing my own antennas for outdoor operating has been part of my enjoyment. This article describes two of them, the “Little Boy” multi-band QRP antenna and the “Fat Man,” a high-performance, three-band, center-loaded portable vertical antenna with wireless remote band switching.
“Little Boy”
As HF QRP operations have become popular, a number of very small, lightweight, shortened portable vertical antennas have been appearing in the ham market place and many hams have also homebrewed similar antennas. They are, of necessity, compromise antennas but have their definite place in our arsenal of ham equipment. For traveling and hiking hams, they are an indispensable tool and, despite their limitations, they do often perform “miracles,” when you operate from a high-altitude QTH, near saltwater or when the band conditions are unusually good. Many great DX contacts have been reported. Many hams are constantly in pursuit of more and more efficient designs within the limitation of size and weight. Here is one of my recent attempts that turned out to be more efficient than the).
