Don’t have the space for an HF Hexbeam so I built one on a paper fan for 70cm just to play with the design. Was able to copy someone 105km (65mi) away who was using 20W and a vertical whip by pointing my 3W and a Hex beam at a power line tower (because he was behind the tall building I was transmitting from). He was a 59 and gave me a 52. He was quite high up but even so, wrong direction, pylon bounce, QRP… Amazing stuff! 73s John
My results are surprisingly close to yours. Had a couple signals under the static, switched to the hex, and it sounded like they were in my driveway!! 73's VA3IRF
Yeah, nothing like a good directional antenna to bring the signals up out of the noise. It also limits the overall noise level into your receiver because much of your gain is in one direction rather than from all around you. 73 and thanks for the comment!
Excellent video! You can really see the signal rejection of the Hex Beam. Question: Did you find the quality of the DX Engineering Hex Beam to be below, meet, or exceed your expectations (the design and materials)?
It exceeded my expectations! Well-designed with quality materials. I will admit to one design feature I didn't really care for: The combination hose clamp/wire guides for each set of wires. You will spend most of your assembly time putting the hose clamps in the correct place, then threading each wire through the small eye on the back of the clamp, along with a plastic bushing. Multiply 6 arms times 5 bands, giving you 30 of these things. Once I had everything in place, though, I didn't need to tune anything. It easily handles full legal power without any fuss, and does very well with heavy winds. Thanks for the commend and your question! Dave - K7DAA
Thanks Dave! I truly appreciate your feed back! Lord willing i will have a plan to buy their antenna and erect it next spring. Dx Eng sells quality stuff so your comments reinforces this. I suspect every Hex beam on the market has similar construction so i am not sure we can avoid the design of the hose clamp design issue you pointed out? @@DaveAndrus
I would have liked to put up a 50 ft tower, and put the hex beam on top of that, but the cost and time were too challenging. I also knew that I was building a new house, and was planning to sell the one where this video was shot, so I didn't want to put up anything that couldn't easily be torn down a year or two later. So, like everything else in life, the antennas were a compromise! The hex beam was definitely a pleasant surprise. I would highly recommend it for 20-10 meters. The vertical in this video has a new home and radial field that works surprisingly well for DX, though. It performs way better than it did in this video. It's much more out in the open, with no houses or other obstructions around it. 73, Dave - K7DAA
It’s interesting to note that your noise floor came up on your vertical and then even more on your dipole, so I wonder if your hex beam improved signal to noise ratio is due to your noise being mostly off the backside of your hex beam or your dipoles feedline is picking up a lot of vertically polarized noise via common mode noise on the feedline???? Someone suggested also doing a transmit test and that would help understand how each antenna radiates whereas your test might have been getting skewed by local noise and how each antenna responds to it. Just FYI, Don
Hi Don @wd8dsb I appreciate your analysis. The dipole and the hex beam both have baluns on them at the feedpoint, so hopefully there is less chance of picking up significant feedline noise, but it's still possible. I also had ferrites on the feedlines where they entered the house. Another possibility is that all of the hex beam's active area (basically the W-shaped driven element) is above the level of the roof, and about 10 feet above the feedpoint of the dipole. So it is above most of the noisy things in the house and nearby buildings. The dipole is an inverted-V type with ends that droop down to about 10 feet above the ground. The vertical, of course, is on the ground. So my guess is that the vertical is most subjected to a) blocking by buildings and trees, and b) noise pick-up of digital noise from the house about 20 feet away. The dipole is a bit less so, but some of it is still blocked by the house, and it runs nearer to noisy things just inside the house. Interestingly enough, that same vertical is now mounted at the back edge of my new property a few miles away on a half-acre, and is about 100 feet from the nearest house. It's now an excellent, low-noise antenna! The feedline is LMR-400 run about 2 feet underground in a PVC pipe. So the only things that changed were the radial system and proximity to buildings. I actually had a more extensive radial system at the house where this video was taken, so it can't be because of a better ground or radials. I often wonder how much better the vertical would have been if it were mounted on the roof with a resonant counterpoise! I've been a ham for almost 60 years, and still work professionally as an RF hardware engineer. I'm still completely fascinated with antennas from 200 kHz to 75 GHz, and the variables that affect them. The fact that I get to design them and also play with them in my spare time is just the most fun for me! Thanks again for stopping by, and 73, Dave - K7DAA
Now we need another video to compare your transmitted signal on each of your antennas to see which one is better… i’m assuming the hex beam would be better but by how much???
@2Meter Crew : First of all, I love your YT logo! I dropped by your channel and sub'd. I used to live in Morgan Hill CA, so very familiar with Mt. Diablo and the Bay Area in general. Now to your question: I'd love to have done the TX comparison test, but didn't have time. I'm also in a different city a few miles away from the house that had this 3-antenna setup, and I don't have the same ability to put the hex beam up on the new house (spousal approval factor and solar panels everywhere!). I'm also right up against the mountains to the east of me, so EU and a good part of the USA is harder now. If I had the hex beam up and turned it to the east or northeast, all the little electrons would bounce off and come flying back at me. I'm that close to these 9,000 ft monsters! I could certainly do Japan or the south Pacific though. If you have a look at my vid that mentions the temporary mag loop, you can see my yard and the mountains. I still have the hex beam, and am planning to set it up periodically in the back yard. The Butternut vertical is also permanently installed now, so I can make a new video comparing them when I get the time. I really appreciate your comments and suggestion!
For a directional antenna, the hexbeam can’t be beat in terms of dollar/performance. You don’t need an expensive 60’ tower and a huge amount of space as opposed to a multiband Yagi. The OCFD is a great performing wire antenna and is my personal preference if I could only choose one multiband wire. I’ve never heard a vertical I personally would use. They are vulnerable to wind, require ground radials, and are generally more noisy than other antennas and perform poorly in residential neighborhoods.
I agree 100% with your first two antenna observations. As for the vertical, I have also had poor experiences in the past with verticals. HOWEVER, I moved the vertical in this video to my new house, and I've been totally amazed at how well it does now. What's the difference? At the new location, I have a much larger yard, and the antenna is located about 100 feet way from my house, and we are also on a gentle rise that has us a few hundred feet above the rest of the town. At the old location, it was only about 25 feet from the house, which also had aluminum siding. So lots of obstruction. This vertical is like a completely new beast! I feed it with LMR-400 coax that is buried under about 24 inches of lawn and dirt, so it doesn't pick up noise, and it doesn't need a choke balun because the earth takes care of that. I'm also using fewer radials than the location in the video, so it's not helped by better ground conductivity. We also have no overhead power or telephone wires--all underground services. At the location in the video, we had power lines running along the back of our yard. I'm sure they added a bunch of noise. I can only conclude that the vertical really wants to be out in the open. I also have to say that I think the Butternut vertical is the most efficient one I've ever used. It has no lossy traps. So there you go--it really surprised me how well the same vertical works now. It just doesn't like buildings, trees, overhead wires, etc. Thanks for your comments--I really appreciate them! 73--Dave--K7DAA
@@DaveAndrustake a look at the momo beam t10. I think you’d like it. I ran a hex for a short while until the ice crumbled it. I decided to stay with more solid antennas. Which butternut do you use Dave?
@@JayN4GO I have a Butternut HF-9V. I haven't heard of the momo beam before. Thanks for the tip--I'll look it up! Yeah, icing can be tough on hex beams and cubical quads. 73, Dave
Don’t have the space for an HF Hexbeam so I built one on a paper fan for 70cm just to play with the design.
Was able to copy someone 105km (65mi) away who was using 20W and a vertical whip by pointing my 3W and a Hex beam at a power line tower (because he was behind the tall building I was transmitting from).
He was a 59 and gave me a 52. He was quite high up but even so, wrong direction, pylon bounce, QRP…
Amazing stuff!
73s John
Nice shack!
My results are surprisingly close to yours. Had a couple signals under the static, switched to the hex, and it sounded like they were in my driveway!! 73's VA3IRF
Yeah, nothing like a good directional antenna to bring the signals up out of the noise. It also limits the overall noise level into your receiver because much of your gain is in one direction rather than from all around you.
73 and thanks for the comment!
You sure have a very nice station. Gives me a bad case of the wants. 73s.
Thanks, I appreciate that. I've actually upgraded to the Elecraft K4 about 18 months ago, and the K3 is now my backup. 73 and thanks for stopping by!
Yea, no empty beer cans to be seen!
Excellent video! You can really see the signal rejection of the Hex Beam. Question: Did you find the quality of the DX Engineering Hex Beam to be below, meet, or exceed your expectations (the design and materials)?
It exceeded my expectations! Well-designed with quality materials.
I will admit to one design feature I didn't really care for: The combination hose clamp/wire guides for each set of wires. You will spend most of your assembly time putting the hose clamps in the correct place, then threading each wire through the small eye on the back of the clamp, along with a plastic bushing. Multiply 6 arms times 5 bands, giving you 30 of these things.
Once I had everything in place, though, I didn't need to tune anything. It easily handles full legal power without any fuss, and does very well with heavy winds.
Thanks for the commend and your question!
Dave - K7DAA
Thanks Dave! I truly appreciate your feed back! Lord willing i will have a plan to buy their antenna and erect it next spring. Dx Eng sells quality stuff so your comments reinforces this. I suspect every Hex beam on the market has similar construction so i am not sure we can avoid the design of the hose clamp design issue you pointed out? @@DaveAndrus
Hexbeam, more optimum take-off angle (for the station in Japan) than the other two antennas.
Hey Frank,
Absolutely--you nailed it!
73, Dave - K7DAA
Is there anything you would’ve done different?
Relating to your equipment?
I would have liked to put up a 50 ft tower, and put the hex beam on top of that, but the cost and time were too challenging. I also knew that I was building a new house, and was planning to sell the one where this video was shot, so I didn't want to put up anything that couldn't easily be torn down a year or two later.
So, like everything else in life, the antennas were a compromise!
The hex beam was definitely a pleasant surprise. I would highly recommend it for 20-10 meters.
The vertical in this video has a new home and radial field that works surprisingly well for DX, though. It performs way better than it did in this video. It's much more out in the open, with no houses or other obstructions around it.
73,
Dave - K7DAA
It’s interesting to note that your noise floor came up on your vertical and then even more on your dipole, so I wonder if your hex beam improved signal to noise ratio is due to your noise being mostly off the backside of your hex beam or your dipoles feedline is picking up a lot of vertically polarized noise via common mode noise on the feedline???? Someone suggested also doing a transmit test and that would help understand how each antenna radiates whereas your test might have been getting skewed by local noise and how each antenna responds to it. Just FYI, Don
Hi Don @wd8dsb I appreciate your analysis. The dipole and the hex beam both have baluns on them at the feedpoint, so hopefully there is less chance of picking up significant feedline noise, but it's still possible. I also had ferrites on the feedlines where they entered the house.
Another possibility is that all of the hex beam's active area (basically the W-shaped driven element) is above the level of the roof, and about 10 feet above the feedpoint of the dipole. So it is above most of the noisy things in the house and nearby buildings. The dipole is an inverted-V type with ends that droop down to about 10 feet above the ground. The vertical, of course, is on the ground.
So my guess is that the vertical is most subjected to a) blocking by buildings and trees, and b) noise pick-up of digital noise from the house about 20 feet away. The dipole is a bit less so, but some of it is still blocked by the house, and it runs nearer to noisy things just inside the house.
Interestingly enough, that same vertical is now mounted at the back edge of my new property a few miles away on a half-acre, and is about 100 feet from the nearest house. It's now an excellent, low-noise antenna! The feedline is LMR-400 run about 2 feet underground in a PVC pipe. So the only things that changed were the radial system and proximity to buildings. I actually had a more extensive radial system at the house where this video was taken, so it can't be because of a better ground or radials. I often wonder how much better the vertical would have been if it were mounted on the roof with a resonant counterpoise!
I've been a ham for almost 60 years, and still work professionally as an RF hardware engineer. I'm still completely fascinated with antennas from 200 kHz to 75 GHz, and the variables that affect them. The fact that I get to design them and also play with them in my spare time is just the most fun for me!
Thanks again for stopping by, and 73,
Dave - K7DAA
Now we need another video to compare your transmitted signal on each of your antennas to see which one is better… i’m assuming the hex beam would be better but by how much???
@2Meter Crew : First of all, I love your YT logo! I dropped by your channel and sub'd. I used to live in Morgan Hill CA, so very familiar with Mt. Diablo and the Bay Area in general.
Now to your question: I'd love to have done the TX comparison test, but didn't have time. I'm also in a different city a few miles away from the house that had this 3-antenna setup, and I don't have the same ability to put the hex beam up on the new house (spousal approval factor and solar panels everywhere!).
I'm also right up against the mountains to the east of me, so EU and a good part of the USA is harder now. If I had the hex beam up and turned it to the east or northeast, all the little electrons would bounce off and come flying back at me. I'm that close to these 9,000 ft monsters! I could certainly do Japan or the south Pacific though. If you have a look at my vid that mentions the temporary mag loop, you can see my yard and the mountains.
I still have the hex beam, and am planning to set it up periodically in the back yard. The Butternut vertical is also permanently installed now, so I can make a new video comparing them when I get the time. I really appreciate your comments and suggestion!
Vlolove very. Vv. v l y oy and thget oo getwere you out b t too @@DaveAndrussee d y.
I did some tests on 20, 10 and 6 meter, and typically gain about 2 S points, over my end fed.
For a directional antenna, the hexbeam can’t be beat in terms of dollar/performance. You don’t need an expensive 60’ tower and a huge amount of space as opposed to a multiband Yagi. The OCFD is a great performing wire antenna and is my personal preference if I could only choose one multiband wire. I’ve never heard a vertical I personally would use. They are vulnerable to wind, require ground radials, and are generally more noisy than other antennas and perform poorly in residential neighborhoods.
I agree 100% with your first two antenna observations. As for the vertical, I have also had poor experiences in the past with verticals. HOWEVER, I moved the vertical in this video to my new house, and I've been totally amazed at how well it does now.
What's the difference? At the new location, I have a much larger yard, and the antenna is located about 100 feet way from my house, and we are also on a gentle rise that has us a few hundred feet above the rest of the town. At the old location, it was only about 25 feet from the house, which also had aluminum siding. So lots of obstruction.
This vertical is like a completely new beast! I feed it with LMR-400 coax that is buried under about 24 inches of lawn and dirt, so it doesn't pick up noise, and it doesn't need a choke balun because the earth takes care of that. I'm also using fewer radials than the location in the video, so it's not helped by better ground conductivity.
We also have no overhead power or telephone wires--all underground services. At the location in the video, we had power lines running along the back of our yard. I'm sure they added a bunch of noise.
I can only conclude that the vertical really wants to be out in the open. I also have to say that I think the Butternut vertical is the most efficient one I've ever used. It has no lossy traps.
So there you go--it really surprised me how well the same vertical works now. It just doesn't like buildings, trees, overhead wires, etc.
Thanks for your comments--I really appreciate them!
73--Dave--K7DAA
@@DaveAndrustake a look at the momo beam t10. I think you’d like it. I ran a hex for a short while until the ice crumbled it. I decided to stay with more solid antennas. Which butternut do you use Dave?
@@JayN4GO I have a Butternut HF-9V. I haven't heard of the momo beam before. Thanks for the tip--I'll look it up! Yeah, icing can be tough on hex beams and cubical quads.
73, Dave