I’ve written about building baluns before. I’m still quite proud of myself that I was able to build and deploy a couple of nice 1:1 baluns.
Of course, the next challenge is the 4:1 balun. I even bought a couple of AB240-125 kits to build one. Since my 40m dipole came down in the ice storm we had here over the weekend, I couldn’t really get on the air, so I decided to try it tonight.
The book Building and Using Baluns and Ununs by Jerry Sevick, W2FMI, has a whole chapter on building 4:1 baluns. After reading through it, I decided to build the Ruthroff design. Here’s the schematic:
The book shows several different designs, but the one that caught my eye was the low-power version on page 24. What I liked about it was that it was built with hookup wire instead of magnet wire. Using some cheap hookup wire, I could play around without possibly ruining the magnet wire.
One problem with using hookup wire is that it’s not as ductile as the magnet wire. This means it has a tendency to want to unravel. I did finally manage to get ten turns around the core, though. Here’s what it looks like:
Next, I clipped a 220-ohm resistor across the input and connected the output to my antenna analyzer. Here’s what I measured:
MHZ | Z |
1.9 | 57 |
3.7 | 58 |
7.1 | 59 |
10.1 | 58 |
14.2 | 56 |
21.2 | 53 |
28.2 | 53 |
Amazingly, the thing actually seems to work! Not only that, it’s relatively flat over the HF frequency range. The next step is to package it into a nice enclosure, then put it to work.
I think my next antenna project is going to be the Cobra Antenna. They use a 4:1 balun to get the impedance of the antenna into a range tuneable by a common antenna tuner. K1JEK sells the antenna for $90-100, but you can build the thing for about a quarter of the price. More on that this weekend.
Ned says
Another interesting project. Ley me know what you wind up with. Looks like 3 wire conductors in parallel on each leg. Wonder how it would work in an inverted V configuration?