About ten years ago, one of the guys in my General Class course, called and asked if I’d like to see his new Buddipole, and oh, by the way, could I bring over my antenna analyzer? When I got over there, he had the Buddipole mounted on a tripod, much the same way as it’s mounted in the picture at right. (Being in Michigan, however, we didn’t have an ocean view and palm trees swaying in the breeze.)
We connected up the antenna analyzer, but no matter what we did, we couldn’t get a good match on 20m. This was puzzling to me, as there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of hams out there that are very successful using Buddipoles in this configuration.
I then suggested that we try one of the Buddipole elements in the vertical position, and operate it against a full, quarter-wavelength counterpoise. I had brought some wire along for just this purpose. We cut it, connected it, and voila, we had a good match.
What brought this all back to mind was that on Monday, another friend called me and asked if I could bring over my antenna analyzer to make some measurements on a dipole that he was attempting to make using a couple of MFJ 30m ham sticks that he bought at Dayton. Although the ham stick is designed to be a vertical antenna, MFJ sells a bracket that supposedly allows you to use two of their ham sticks as a dipole, much like the Buddipole. He told me that no matter what he tried, he couldn’t seem to get the SWR down.
Before going over there, I found an item on reddit that I thought might help him. I emailed this to him, but he replied that he tried all of the suggestions, but “still no luck.”
So, last night, I went over to his house. He had disconnected one of the ham sticks, and when I connected the analyzer to it, I got a reading between 2.5:1 and 3:1. I suggested that we try connecting a wire counterpoise to it, but he was hot on getting the dipole configuration to work, so we screwed in the other element. Whoa! The SWR jumped up to 8.5:1.
We buzzed out the connections to make sure that there were no shorts and that one of the ham sticks was connected to the center conductor of the coax, and that the other ham stick was connected to the shield. We also moved the mast away from the house. Neither of these had any affect on the SWR.
At this point, he decided just to return the ham sticks to MFJ. Even so, it bugs me a little that we couldn’t get this to work. I’m wondering if any of you might give us a little insight as to what we’re doing wrong. It doesn’t seem like it should be so complicated, but as I’ve said before, I’m certainly not an antenna expert.