Fred, KT5X – AKA WS0TA, recently put together this document with a lot of antenna ideas (and what led him there). I’ve used information Fred shared with me to make the antenna traps for my tri-band EFHW antenna (I really gotta write about that sometime!). Fred asked me to post this PDF so he can share this info for anyone that might need it.
One of the particularly intriguing (to me) ideas in this PDF is the “beam” antenna on page 4. Enjoy!
There are a lot of different types of SOTA operators out there. Some like to bring a lot of equipment, some like to bring very little. For most, it depends on the type of activation they’re doing, or perhaps what equipment they have. Personally, I like to do a little bit of everything, including lightweight minimal equipment.
I’ve conversed with Fred Maas, KT5X, a number of times on some of the incredible things he’s doing to minimize his SOTA setup. He has a great trapped end-fed half-wave (EFHW) setup he’s come up with for an antenna. It uses two small traps to get multi-band function out of a single wire. Traps certainly aren’t a new thing in the ham world, but tiny traps like his are certainly an original concept. After getting info on how to build my own, I collaborated with him to design tiny PCBs for the traps. After feedback from him and a couple of revisions, we had a functional WS0TA trap PCB. And this thing is tiny!