Peter Parker - Hand-carried QRP antennas: Simple antennas and accessories to operate from almost anywhere

When thinking about antennas it is common to type HF antenna or similar into a search engine. Searching is fun. Youll get thousands of links to various antenna designs and even more opinions on them. The choices presented are baffling.

Which to choose? Its useful to imagine yourself using the antenna . Your mental picture should be as detailed as possible, including where youll be, who youll talk to, likely time of day and bands used. And it needs to include carrying, erecting and dismantling the antenna, which a poor choice can make a hassle.

I find thinking is best done just before or after sleep where imagination is more vivid and less encumbered by sensory input. The thoughts gathered will help determine what you want and which designs and configurations can be ruled out.

Cultivating an informed appreciation of what is and is not practical with QRP keeps your thinking real. To take an extreme example, you would not get very far if your aim was to work Australia from the USA at midday local time on 3.5 MHz. Neither would regular 300km contacts be realistic on bands like 28 MHz during all but abnormal conditions.

Distinguish your objectives between the fanciful (not worth bothering with like the examples above) and the feasible, challenging and worthwhile (e.g. working Australia from Europe on 7 MHz QRP). Understanding signal propagation and reading what other QRPers have achieved helps separate the two. The time taken to do this is good insurance against getting side-tracked by aims with little chance of success.

Objectives may include working a particular band, country, station or propagation path out of pure interest. Or they may be set by award rules or contest scoring. An award may require a minimum number of contacts from a particular location to qualify as an activation. A contest may give more points to different prefixes, states, shires, counties or grid squares. Being on a regional border or seeking good results over certain paths may drive your strategy.

Others have more general interests and enjoy working anyone anywhere. A take what comes approach is particularly rewarding if youre trying a new homebrew rig or experimenting with antennas. It also does a service to hamdom in keeping alive the bands between contests and the joy of spontaneous contacts.

To me the ability to get answers to CQ calls made with QRP marks a successful antenna from the rest. However it must be suitably transportable. The best antenna thats too heavy to routinely take out will not do as well as a lighter version that gets used, so its type and materials are important and covered later.