Yesterday, while working a guy on 30m, we got to talking about antennas, and I mentioned that I had a fan dipole with legs for 30m and 40m and a 20m ground plane antenna. He said, “That sounds good. With that setup, you can work four bands, 40 through 15.”
I almost slapped myself. I’d never even thought about doing that, even though it’s a common practice. In fact, this was a very common practice for Novices, back in the days when we all started out as Novices. The reason this works is that 15m (21 MHz) is an odd harmonic of 40m (7 MHz), and the impedance of a half-wave dipole antenna is about 70 ohms for not only the fundamental frequency, but for all odd harmonics as well.
Last night, I gave this a try. Sure enough, the rig tuned up just fine on 15m. Unfortunately, the band was dead at that point.
This morning, however, was a different story. I turned the rig on at 7:30 am, and while I didn’t expect the band to be open so early, decided to give it a go anyway. Surpisingly, I could hear plenty of Europeans. I called CQ a couple of times, but only got one response, and that station disappeared shortly after making contact.
Tuning around a bit, I heard a pileup and identified the DX station at HC8L on the Galapagos Islands. He was working the Europeans one right after the other. I’m not much for pileups, but since I wasn’t having much success calling CQ, I decided to give him a shout. I tuned up 1.5 KHz from his calling frequency, cranked the RIT down so I could hear him and began calling. I got him on my third call!
So, in less than 24 hours, I went from not having 15m capability (at least in my own mind) to working DX. Just think of all the DX I missed, though, by not realizing I could get on 15m with my 40m dipole. D’oh!
NEXT: Seeing how well the 30m dipole works on 10m.
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