After 50 years…..SUCCESS!

I’m really not great when it comes to antennas, and when I was a kid, I was even less so. And, because my family lived in a subdivision with hardly any tall trees, about the only antenna that I could get into the air was a 14AVQ vertical, mounted on the ground in my back yard.

I yearned to have a better antenna, and fell prey to several scams, or perhaps I should say to over-blown claims. One of them was the Partridge Electronics Joystick VFA antenna (see below). I spent $80 or $90 on this antenna, and in 1970s dollars, that was a substantial amount of money. Alas, because I didn’t really understand antennas, I never got it to work.

But, even though I never got it to work, I carted it around with me for the past 50 years. It accompanied me to Sunnyvale, CA, then San Diego, CA, and then back to Michigan.  I kept thinking that someday things would fall into place, and I’d figure out how to make a contact with it.

Over the years, I did learn more about antennas, but the more I learned about them, the lower my opinion of the Joystick. It really is a compromise antenna. As you can see from the advertisement above, the antenna itself is just a metal rod with a loading coil in the center. One end of the antenna is connected to an antenna tuner. The radiating element is only about 7 feet tall, so honestly, how good of a radiator can it be, especially at lower frequencies?

Well, this Monday, the opportunity arose for me to try to make a contact with the Joystick. On the third Monday of each month, our club, holds an event with call AMP Team meetings. AMP stands for “ARROW Mobile and Portable,” and we drag out all kinds of QRP  and portable gear to a local park and try to make contacts. It’s kind of like a mini-Field Day. Our June AMPTeam meeting was held in Hunt Park, which is just up the street from where I live.

I got there early to reserve a couple of picnic tables at the northeast end of the park. I set up my gear and hoisted the Joystck up in the air using a convenient tree branch, plugged the single-wire feedline into the antenna tuner (see right), the strung out a counterpoise. My first thought was to try 20 meters, since the antenna is so short.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t get it to tune on 20 meters for some reason. The lowest SWR I could obtain was about 3:1. After fooling around with it for more than a half hour, I decided to try 40 meters instead.

On 40 meters, I was successful right away, achieving a 1.3:1 SWR with a few twists of the tuner’s dials. I hooked the antenna up to my KX-3 and began scouting around for contacts. Unfortunately, it didn’t sound like anyone could hear me. Calling CQ yielded no calls, and when I tried to answer CQs or tail-end a QSO, I got the same results. Finally, someone heard me, but I guess I was too weak because they never did get my call right.

I kept at it, though, and finally managed to make a contact, with K9ID in Wisconsin. He bailed on me pretty quickly, but still it was my first contact in 50 years with this antenna!!

I managed to make two more contacts Monday evening. The second contact was kind of like the first, very short with the other operator bailing on me because my signal was so weak. The third, however, was a very nice contact, with signal reports of 569 both ways. The funny thing was this third op was also running QRP.

The final verdict is that this antenna is definitely not an antenna for QRP work. With it being so short, I’m sure that it’s very inefficient. I was, however, quite excited to actually make a contact with it, finally.