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Last summer I built myself a Cobwebb antenna and was fairly pleased with the results. I did think it was a bit heavy and was looking to repeat the build with some lighter weight wire until I came across this article from a well-known antenna buff, G3TXQ. It looked like just the ticket so I copied the design and low and behold after a few evening work I finished it off. Here it is during the tuning phase of work which I completed over the weekend (which by the way is as simple as tuning any dipole).

By the way the tropical weather (read blue sky) in St Bees is a welcome change from the recent flooding. I doubt it’ll last though!

You can see the usual antenna laying down in the background, which is a Hustler 6-BTV vertical which has suffered at the hands of the strong winds and salt air we get here. Once I had assembled both the antenna’s I was able to make a bit of a comparison between the two. The vertical is a good S point down on the Cobwebb on 20m, 17m and 15m and about the same on 12m and 10m (at that height!). To be fair it doesn’t have the 17m stub so that’s a bit of a poor comparison. I did managed to get it a little higher with the fishing pole but need to work on the mounting point and ‘environmental protection’ that it’ll need to be used here. Either that or it’ll go into the loft with the 40m dipole that’s up there at the moment.

For some reason I really enjoy these antennas, either to build or use but Michael, ZS1RJQ who I’m in regular contact with over email has built a fair few more than me. His are far more robust than mine but between us we’ve discussed the hardware side plenty of times and before long we’ll end up with an optimised lightweight design. This one is so far the most compact and well worth a tinker if you’re into that. Thanks to G3TXQ for the original design.

With Halloween coming up shortly maybe I’ll put a spider on it!