It has been serving as the focus of twenty-eight 33′ radials and a 16.6′ vertical antenna for over a year with great results. A QSO, a 20 meter phone QSO, with a station in Australia was the highlight. Okay he had a stack of four 20 meter beams phased and pointing straight at me, but it still makes me like my dirt based 20 meter vertical.

The old antenna has a custom home-brew mount which required an insulated ground pipe to work correctly. This pipe was a piece of PVC about 1.5 inches in diameter.

After a year of service, here is what the antenna looks like…

16 Foot Vertical

Don’t laugh… it works weeds and all.

This antenna works on 20, 17 and 15 meters, but is rather pointless for 10, 40, etc. for obvious reasons. So recently I decided to change the vertical to a new 43 foot, tuner required, model to gain access to other bands with as little change as possible. As this antenna desires to be attached to a 2 inch OD pipe, I dutifully purchased one at the local home center and replaced the smaller PVC pipe of the former antenna.

Things were going splendidly until I tried to clamp the radial plate to the new two inch OD pipe…

DX Engineering Radial Plate with 2 inch OD pipe

Hmmm, the holes in the DX Engineering Radial plate would not accommodate clamps this large even though the instructions that came with the antenna clearly suggest it would.

Could it be the current Radial Plate was different than the one two years ago?

An email to DX Engineering promptly confirmed my suspicions. They changed the design of the plate to wider slots to accommodate larger clamps in addition to the originally supported narrow clamps.

They did this without an obvious change to the model name to emphasize the difference.

They suggested the hardened stainless steel would most certainly harm all, but the toughest drill bits. My choices are to take it to a machine shop to enlarge the holes or just purchase a new one. I have access to a machine shop, but have decided to just purchase another one and save the older unit for other projects.

DX Engineering perhaps could have done something different here. On the other hand, at least they are continuing the development of their product lines. A little lesson in Configuration Management would go a long way to helping them clearly name new revisions of products something different.

Oh well. I remain a big fan of DX Engineering if nothing else for the superior materials used. The old radial plate has been sitting in the dirt for over a year and has zero corrosion issues. Bravo.

Well, to be honest you may well have just as much success with a simple horizontal dipole strung up.

Dipoles are pretty easy to build and don’t cost too much if you would rather purchase one from Alpha-Delta or the Wireman.

However, if you…

• don’t have trees to support your dipole
• already have a dipole, but are interested in seeing if a vertical provides more performance
• have no antenna, but lots of property to try something new
• just want to try something different

…then this simple vertical antenna is for you.

The description on its construction are contained within the pages of…

It is nothing more than several sections of copper plumbing pipe available at any hardware outlet such as Home Depot, Lowes, etc.

The key to any practical ground mounted vertical antenna is radials, radials and more radials. I choose the radial concentrator plate from DX Engineering to organize my radial attachments. In my case each radial is 33 feet long, but since this is ground mounted, the radials are not tuned which means the lengths are not super critical.

I buried the coax between the house and the antenna.

As you can see…

16 foot vertical antenna over radial wires

…this antenna has a simple appearance. However, it works quite well on 20, 17 and 15 meters. I have a few 10 meter contacts too, but this is arguably the wrong band for an antenna cut for 20 meters.

Soon I will be putting up a dipole too since I actually do have a few trees of modest height. I am considering the Alpha-Delta DX-CC as a friend of mine has a large log from his. Plus, this will get me on 40 and 80 meters which is, at this point in the solar cycle, a good place to operate.

When I have both antennas I will do some simple AB comparisons asking:

• Does the vertical receive more noise as everyone suggests it might?
• Does the vertical provide better low angle performance?
• Does either antenna provide a benefit for certain bands and distances?
• Is a replacement vertical radiator such as the continuously tunable SteppIR BigIR vertical or the “tuner-required” 43 foot radiator several companies are selling something worth considering?
• Assuming I get a vertical with more bands along with the dipole DX-CC am I done with antennas for my QTH?

One of the things I love about ham radio is exactly these kind of choices.

Even though my radials are good and plenty, I realize the low angle performance is more reliant on the local soil conditions up to many wavelengths away from the antenna rather than anything I do with my radials. Still radials are there to ensure your antenna efficiency is good so you still should have plenty. Look up the excellent details on Cebik’s web site for more information before you try to understand what radials do for vertical antennas.

If you desire to try a vertical antenna, consider this simple copper pipe version. It is cheap, but does require quite a bit of radial wire. However, if you like what you get with your vertical antenna and want to upgrade to something better, the investment in your radial system will translate right over to your new antenna… and that antenna will love you for it.

UPDATE 2009:
I made my first, and so far only, Phone contact with Australia using this antenna on 20 meters. I was thrilled. This suggests simple antennas do work. However, I do admit the quad array of 20 meter beams used by the Aussie were the significant factor in our QSO