Good antenna installations rarely start with a blank slate and unlimited space. Mine started with a lucky find inside the walls.
When I moved into the house, I discovered that previous owners had run conduit through the walls for 75-ohm TV coax. At the time I didn’t think much of it — but when the radio interest took hold, those conduits turned out to be exactly what I needed. Out came the old coax, and in went new 50-ohm RG8X Mini, routed from two rooms up to the attic. One run goes to the living room where the everyday VHF radio lives, the other down to what has become a natural shack in the basement.
VHF — Diamond X30
The living room feed connects to a Diamond X30 antenna mounted on the roof. It’s a simple vertical collinear for 2m and 70cm, and the results have been consistently good. Strong signals from local and regional repeaters, reliable everyday performance — no complaints.
HF — Homebrew OCF Windom
The shack in the basement is a different story. HF antennas need space, and the plot is not generous. The solution was a homebuilt Off-Centre Fed Windom, fed with a 1:6 balun sourced from AliExpress and WD-1/TT field wire for the elements.
Fitting a 40-metre antenna on a small urban plot requires creativity. The feed point hangs from a mast pipe about 6 metres above ground, with the two elements spreading out at roughly a 100-degree angle to make use of the available space. The short element runs approximately 13.5 metres, with its end supported by a cheap 6-metre fishing rod from Biltema. The long element stretches about 27 metres, supported by fishing rods at the midpoint and at the far end — the same model, bought in quantity.
It is not a textbook installation. The antenna hangs low, the geometry is far from ideal, and fishing rods are doing the work of proper masts. But it performs surprisingly well in practice, particularly on 80m, 40m, and 20m, where the low height actually works in favour of NVIS propagation — useful for regional contacts across Scandinavia and northern Europe.
Sometimes constraints lead to solutions you wouldn’t have chosen otherwise. This antenna is proof of that.