The station in the family garden

I'm living in the eastern part of Dresden, about 6 km from the centre and abt 2 km from the famous Elbe river bridge "the blue wonder". About 15km from this location in the north of Dresden not to far from the airport our family owns a garden of about 1200 m². This garden is cultivated since around 1930 by the father and mother of my XYL and now used by our family and the family of my brother in law. I'm happy to use this garden since abt 40 years for amateur radio experiments, testing antennas, QRP- and QRO-stations. The greatest antenne was a 80m-delta-loop at abt 18m over ground between two high trees. In the last winters I tested verticals for 80m and 160m built from a cranktower extended by a 10m-army whip. In the last summer 2003  I started with a spiderbeam-kit (by DF4SA) mounted on a 8m cranktower and later on a 12m cranktower and this was a great DX success . For the season 2005 the spiderbeam was extended to 5 bands with 14 elements (4/2/3/2/3 on 10/12/15/17/20m).  It is doing a great job !

The spiderbeam consists of four light weight fiberglasstubes with a length of 5m each mounted as a cross. A lot of ropes are installed for the stabilty and the active elements are built from thin special designed wires, called DX-wires. The weight of the complete antenna is less then 5 kp ::

On the detail picture you may have a look of the construction :

The antenna is fed via a 50-ohm-coaxcable. Beneath the feeding of the parallel dipols for 10, 15 and 20 meter you can see a special choke with 40 ferritcores to suppress energy on the cable surface. The directors and reflectors are mounted angled starting on the tubes perpendicular to the radiators. There are 3ele on 20m, 3 ele on 15m and 4 ele on 10m. There are no losses caused by  traps and transformers. The SWR-ratio I measured was down to 1:1,2 and less in the center  of  all bands. The best part of the antenna is the radiation diagramm. The V/B-ratio reaches 15dB and more. In a lot of cases I listened e.g. to northeast and got a DXspot from the caribics. Changed the frequency and heard nothing. Turned the antenna around. With the antenna to southwest the spots cames up, reached a 57 in the western direction, I called him, got an answer immediatly and noted a new bandpoint.

My station in the garden shelter looks as follows :

At the left side a old pentium gets the charity, mostly running LOGGER32 and MixW2.12, the antenna is turned by a YAESU KR-650, a packet link goes to throug a PTC-2 and an surplus FM-transceiver to the local DXcluster. In the center you will find my portable transceiver TS-50 (doing still a good job) and at the right an old YAESU FL-2100Z is located, putting max. 400 watts to the beam.
There are two other antennas : a Cushcraft-R7-vertical and a FD4-Windom. Earlier I used the R7 for the WARC-bands, but I found that the spiderbeam is doing a good job as a better "rotating dipole" an 12m and 17m. The SWR ist bad, but the results are good. The R7 is used on 30 and 40m and the FD4 on 40 and 80m.
In the winter season the 12m-cranktower is extended with the 10m whip and used together with wire radials as a gamma-feeded vertical on 80m and 160m. Have a look to the tuner network consisting of high voltage capacitors. But in most cases it is  too cold to sit for longer times in the garden shelter without heating and the antenna is only used in great contests for an evening or a morning at sunset or sunrise.

DM3ML, 19 Jun 2004

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