I received an email from Scott KN3A concerning his experimenting with the Speaker Wire antenna that I previously posted about. I’m going to let Scott blog this in his own words copied from his email…

Last week Marshall Harrison (W4MKH) gave me an idea based on his recent article in his W4MKH-QRP blog, and that is to do a QRP activation using speaker wire 28.5 feet long connected to a BNC binding post coax splitter adapter. One end went nearly vertical into the air with my 24 ft. crappie pole, and the other side ran along on the ground. I had done this a couple of years ago but had not done it recently, and not on my Xiegu X6100. 

I really didn’t have a lot of time to do a Parks On The Air activation, but I worked 16 QSO’s in about 40 minutes on 20, 30 and 40 meters with QRP power. This antenna configuration had surprising results.

12 of the 16 QSO’s I sent a 559, I sent one 579 and one 599, and two I gave 229. What was surprising to me was, if they were giving me honest signal reports, I was heard better than I was hearing them. 6 of the QSO’s gave me a better signal report than I gave them. I got four 599, 1 579 and 11 559. 

I’m hoping I can get out and try this again and see if I have similar results with this antenna configuration.

Thanks again Marshall for your report. I did not take any pictures from my activation, and these were all CW QSO’s.

73 Scott

KN3A

The antenna image in this post are mine as Scott didn’t provide any images of his antenna.