Winter has come and is on its way out. I had a 1/4 mile roll of #14 gauge electric fence wire. I was about to make an attempt to finally get on the Top Band, with the building of the giant 160 meter dipole. Bring it on!

I’m going to tell you that it was a job getting this long dipole antenna up in the air. One leg wasn’t so bad; the other one was through the brush with small trees. Ouch! While I am using aluminum electric fence wire, I acknowledge that bare wire will cause havoc if it touches any limbs or branches. Snip snip…

The roll of fence wire was heavy (bad back here) as I measured my cut for 1900 kHz and rolled it out. Each leg was to be 123 feet. Multiply this times 2 and you get 246 feet of wire hanging in the air. This is a lot of wire to manage and the #14 gauge is very stiff. It should take some weathering I’m hoping. And 1/4 mile of wire will make a lot of antennas. I know that there are many critics of the aluminum fence wire.

Surprisingly enough, the silver wire is nearly invisible hanging in the sky.

I prefer the copper wire that has a plastic coat on it, but this would have costed about $100 to build the 160 meter antenna alone. The price of the aluminum electric fence wire was about 1/3 of that and I walked away with 1/4 mile of wire, instead of enough for one antenna only. I thought it was quite a bargain.

The 160-meter band is mostly a wintertime band from what I gather. And then it is only a nighttime band at that. Most hams will not even respond to you unless you have an amplifier on this band. I later found out that a long wire like this is a monster to keep tuned. I’m not sure if this is the aluminum wire or just the nature of the long wire. I understand why many hams completely avoid the 160M band.

The other HF bands are much easier to operate and the antennas require a lot less real estate. The propagation for this band is complicated. Here we go.

I thought that the fence wire performed almost as well as the copper wire. I am used to working with the copper. Copper is hard to beat for playing radio.

The characteristics of the 160 meter dipole is interesting. It plays fantastic on 80 meters. It plays very fair on 40 meters. Even on 20 meters and 17 meters, receive was surprising.

And of course on 160 meters I could now actually hear the QSO’s with decent signal quality. I worked seven or eight different states on this antenna with only 100 watts, but as the QRN rolled in for the night it became too much of a challenge. Boy is it ever noisy. Noisy, noisy, and noisy.

The Top Band is another experience altogether. There is more space in the basement but it still occasionally gets crowded, believe it or not. I found quickly that a microphone with a little bass is advantageous in the thick QRN.

Well, almost time for the aurora and better propagation for the higher bands. On to another antenna project. Happy DXing!