A portable multi-band End-Fed Half Wave (EFHW) antenna for 40-10m

The camping washing line spool used for the antenna wire.

A few people have asked about the 30m antenna Norfolk Amateur Radio Club used for its International Marconi Day (IMD) operations at Caister Lifeboat this year.

Ten Megahertz (30m) turned out to be a useful band for us, allowing CW contact after CW contact, despite poor conditions after a geomagnetic storm and a K index of five.

The antenna we used was a portable 40-10m multi-band end-fed half wave (EFHW) with a 49:1 Unun using an FT240-43 toroid.

It used a wire 9m vertically metres up a fishing pole and then about 5.8m out.

The novel thing was that I only built it the day before and it uses a Coghlan camping washing line spool with the string taken off and about 21m of wire wound onto it.

Download the instructions