Inverted Vee as a multiband antenna

Here is a photograph of my inverted Vee antenna. In this picture the wires of the antenna and the guy wires of the mast are clearly visible.

I took this picture early on a winter Saturday morning, when the wires were covered by half an inch of ice. (Hi)

15 Minutes later the sun had melted the ice. The blue wire of the antenna is most of the time invisible for the eye against a blue sky.

So the antenna showed up in the picture for the first time. hi.

Inverted Vee on top of my roof

Inverted Vee

The wires

The wire on this side of the house was 10.7 meters long and supported about 2.5 meters above the ground, and is sloping to the east.

The other wire is sloping to the west and supported by the rain gutter on the other side of the house.

This wire also had a length of 10.7 meters, and is folded back over a length of about 4 meters.  The antenna is symmetrical and is fed via a 300 ohm ribbon.

Later I realized that I could make the wire longer, than a quarter of a wave length on 40 m. So in later versions of my inverted Vee, I used a length of 12 m for each of the wires. Nowadays, I use flexible wire.

Multi band antenna

I use the inverted Vee as a multi band antenna for all bands from 1.8 MHz to 144 MHz. In the shack on the first floor I use a homebrew symmetrical tuner for 80 m to 10 m.

The antenna needs to be tuned on every band. I have to tune the antenna every time when I change bands.

On 80 m the antenna needs to be re-tuned every 20 kHz. And on 160 m every 5 kHz. On 160 m an extension coil is used with the tuner.

Because of the short length of the antenna on 160 m and 80 m, I usually need a power of 5 Watts to be heard.

On 40 m to 10 m I often use the lowest possible power. When the propagation is very good to extremely good my power can vary from 500 mW to 5 milliwatt.

One year on one wire

Even when my Inverted Vee had one leg missing, years ago, I still made QRPp and QRPpp QSO’s for about one year on just one wire. hi.

Holiday transmatch

Holiday transmatch

Because my symmetrical tuner is designed for frequencies under 30 MHz, I use my holiday transmatch >> on 6 m and 2 m . Although it is an asymmetrical tuner, it works great.