After I purchased my Kenwood TS-590 station in 2012, originally had only an IMAX 2000 antenna installed on the rooftop - strapped to my chimney. While this worked well on 10 meter (28MHz band) and on 12 meter, as soon as I started using it on upper bands it was clear that it will not perform well. This is after all a CB (Civil Band) antenna. I guess I was lucky as when I installed this antenna the 10 meter band was open and for about a month or two I was able to make lots of contacts. THen the band closed and I had to move to other bands - where my antenna was not performing as well as I wanted.
Due to the small space available in my backyard - I have a shed on a 32.5 x 32.5 ft backyard all antennas which require high towers, or more real estate like dipoles, inverted V's were out of question. The only thing I could opt for was another vertical, this time a 43ft long multi-band vertical from LDG Electronics. The selected antenna was the S9V43 antenna. This not only required minimal real estate for installation, but it has a green telescopic mast which very well is hidden in the neighborhood, so it does not attract unwanted attention from the neighbors.
Usually when I decide on something I do my homework. I spent days and days researching and learning about this antenna, how other do the installation, what are the best practices and of course what results one can expect from the antenna when it is properly installed.
I found a powerpoint document on the web created by Douglas Edmond Leach (VE3XK) who did a marvelous job on puling most of the data together about this vertical. The presentation can be fond here: Gound Mounted Verticals V10.
During the installation I followed most of his instructions and tried to make the installation as close to his as possible. The main difference that I have the antenna tuner built into my radio, so I did not use a remote antenna tuner as he did. For over a year now I was using this antenna in various competitions with variable results and luck. While I am happy with my results, I am not looking into replacing the IMAX 2000 antenna on the chimney with a much better multi-band hexa beam. That installation however will be detailed in another post.
For now I wanted to share the two videos related to the vertical antenna. The first, below is a time lapse video of the 2 days work I put into the installation of the S9V43 vertical antenna:
I hope you enjoy these.
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