Saturday 18 June 2011

SRC Mobile update

Although HF conditions in my opinion have not been too good lately, I have now had a little time to evaluate the SRC mobile whip.
It certainly appears to be a robust enough antenna physically and it looks well made. Using my LDG auto ATU I can now tune all bands from 80 to 10 metres. The antenna seems quite lively on receive, within the first few days of using it and under poor conditions I worked a DL station on 20 metres, he was calling CQ and came back to me straight away. I can monitor a local 80 metre AM net on my morning drive to work, although I would think that 80 metres is likely to be the worst band for this antenna.

Because the "Tune" function on my Icom 706 MK1 does not operate on 6metres I am unable to get the LDG atu to work on that band. I have found however that by tuning the whip up on 80 metres and then switching to 6 I get an acceptable SWR and indeed the antenna appears to work reasonably well on 6.

All in All I am pleased with the SRC. It is very convenient having all the HF bands available without swapping whips and the performance does not seem to be noticeably different from the mono band whips I had been using.