My 6 Meter / 50Mhz Antenna build

By ve7wnk on July 6, 2012

I watched a YouTube video by Randy, K7AGE, where he talked about building a 6 meter dipole. This super simple antenna is so easy that I would have to find an excuse to NOT make it. Randy’s video (and many others on the net) made me want to try it out and I wanted to play on “the magic” band. After a few minutes of thinking I jumped in with two feet and started looking for 6 meter yagi antenna designs. I stumbled onto the YU7EF EF0604s antenna.

This antenna is a simple 4 element beam that is relatively compact, the longest element is just over 9ft and the boom is only 8ft! I started off wanting to make this antenna portable, however after drawing up the design I visited my favorite metal retailer for some aluminum tubing and discovered that they did not carry the sizes that I needed to make the elements telescopic. I ended up settling on single lengths of 3/4inch aluminum tubing with 1/16th inch walls for the elements. The boom is an 8ft piece of 1inch square aluminum tubing. The elements are held to the beam using hydraulic hose clamps. The boom is mounted to a pole using a pair of pipe/exhaust clamps which are bolted to a 4inch square plate of 1/8th inch think aluminum.

I posted the pictures from the build and testing phase via Google+

Click here do download the PDF sketch of the visio drawing I did:

Click for PDF

Visio mapping of the antenna. Click to download the PDF

The beam as dusk

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ARRL June VHF Contest

By ve7wnk on June 14, 2012

Last weekend, a few hams from the lower mainland took a trip to Promontory Hills near Merritt BC. See it on a Google map.

We operated single-band on 6 Meters from inside of a local telecommunications companies microwave site compound. Conditions were poor the first day, however the band opened up Sunday morning as we were packing up. We did not operate after 11AM as we started ripping everything down so that we could be out of the site before the sun set.

In this video you will see me operating the last few minutes of the end of the contest.

Here is VE7HHS working the pile up while VE7STK marks the grid squares.

As mentioned, conditions were poor for the most part, and we really did not really have a rate going until Sunday. Weather was interesting up at altitude, and it even snowed on us (on and off) for a few hours on Friday night, however none of it really stuck. Sunday, as is always the case, was our nicest weather day, and we had nice temperatures the whole time.

Our unchecked/ray log file is available here.

Photos will be uploaded soon. My next post will probably be able the 2012 Field Day event in Coquitlam or the construction of my FM Radio wide-band aluminum dipole.

Operators: VE7HHS, VE7FET(plus first harmonic Scott), VE7NEO, VE7STK, VA7NSA, VE7TL, VA7LNX, and VE7WNK.

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ARRL VHF QSO Party 2011 VE7SCC Portable CO90

By ve7wnk on August 5, 2011

Me “operating” the contest when band was shifting. I typically call/run during contests but in this first video I am running around the band looking for others. In this video I end up working XE2K in DM22 Mexico which is a pretty damn good contact on 6 meters. I also worked WA7JTM in DM46 (Grand Canyon) who had a massive signal from his location.


In this video I am running up the contacts from inside the station. We set up a low power FM transmitter inside so that we could listen to the operating position from outside of the building. In the video you will see the other operators and the microwave site we camped out at.

All of the videos in this series are filmed by VE7HHS.

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Found: Old Video from Thynne Mtn Fall VHF Contest.

By ve7wnk on January 3, 2011

Safety third. Here is video of VE7HHS up the portable tower on Thynne Mtn. You can’t tell from the video but it is at, or below zero up at this hill top. This was the first, and basically only, blue sky we had for the whole trip. Notice how fast the clouds are ripping by!

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Cornwall VHF Contest 2009

By ve7wnk on December 6, 2010

This came after the posting below. Here we actually made it to the place we wanted to go, and operated. You will see the towers and antennae that we drug up the hill with us, the operating position, and a wild fire that started while we were up on the hill. We called the fire in, gave it’s location from the BC Forestry Lookout, which was once manned. When we called they had no idea where we were; sad really. The second fire was most exciting as we were the first to report it.

Again, video credits go to Ryan VE7STK


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