Things I've Learned about Antennas - Horizontal Antennas

I've been fooling around with radio for more than 40 years. Finished my first receiver January 1971, so I guess it's closer to 44 years. In those early years, I didn't know anything about antennas. My initial antennas were nothing more than magnet wire strung up around my attic bedroom. They worked - Badly.

Over the years, I've learned a few bits of wisdom about antennas. This article is about:

• Horizontal Antennas

Be they dipoles, center-fed Zepps, yagis, quads, Vee beams or rhombics -- horizontal antennas share one key characteristic -- their most important dimension is height above ground in wavelengths.

The height determines the radiation pattern, impedance and much of the loss. I remember a few years ago on the QRP mailing lists there was a hot debate about one of W4RNL's designs -- the "88 foot" dipole. When LB modeled this antenna -- meant to be a secondary or spare antenna when your beam failed in the middle of a contest -- he did so at 100 feet and also at 70 feet. 

This design was supposed to give reasonable performance on 80, 40 and 20m. 88 feet worked out to be about right. Long enough not to have too crazy impedance on 80m, and short enough to not have a lot of deep nulls on 20m. At 100 feet, I bet it is a pretty good performer. At 70 feet, it wasn't a slouch, either. The odd-ball impedance would make for some loss in the feed line, but for a spare antenna, that wasn't a huge concern.

From the discussions, you'd like that 88 feet was somehow a magic number that made everything work better. Heck, if you have the room make it a full-size 80m dipole then add a couple of traps, for pete's sake. And do you think those QRP stations put up that 88 feet of wire at 100 or even 70 feet? Heck no, they were down at more practical heights of 20-35 feet. 35 feet might be passible for 20m, since it is 1/2 wavelength up. But it is only 1/4 wavelength for 40m, and 1/8 wavelength for 80m. 

Here's the deal: the pattern of a dipole is hugely affected by the height above ground. About 1/2 wavelength, it just starts to have a bidirectional pattern, and only that at pretty high angles. Lower than 1/2 wavelength, it's basically got an ice-cream-cone shaped pattern going straight up. This pattern is rarely desirable.

How high is enough? At some point above about 2 wavelengths, the dipole pattern looks a lot more like free space. For beams, at these heights, you can start to get nulls in your pattern at useful angles, so you have to be careful. Somewhere between 1/2 and 2 wavelengths is generaly the "sweet" spot for horizontal antennas. For specific applications, your best bet is to model the antenna at the desired height and watch for undesirable nulls.

Given that most hams don't have supports for antennas above 50-70 feet, it's likely that any antenna below 20m is too low. Get those antennas as high as you can.