I posted in February about The 160 Meter Electric Fence Wire Dipole and I am going to take another look at this HF antenna. I have made some changes in my arrangement of this antenna. Some strong winds snapped one of the wires, so I opted to better the situation if possible.

Here are the dimensions in case you want to build the 160 meter dipole yourself. This antenna receives decent on AM radio broadcasts also!

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. I will mention again that I used cheap, aluminum wire that can be bought at most local feed supply stores or local hardware stores. Yes, this is the electric fence wire that is used to contain livestock. I grabbed the bigger wire on the shelf.

Before, I had the dipole sort of low to the ground in a flat-top position. It required more effort, but I decided to climb the tower and add some height to my repositioned antenna. It is now an inverted vee antenna. I have the apex at about 30 feet and it works much better than it did before. I am getting much better signal strength now. It’s amazing what another 10 feet will do for reception. I can actually hear the ham operators now!

I heard some amateur radio operators discussing about height of antennas. Their conversation made a lot of sense. The point made was that the higher the antenna was mounted the better the pattern will be for DXing. If the antenna is mounted lower, the better the pattern will be for local transmissions. This was a very good way of putting it I thought. Some of these old guys are very smart.

I know that 30 feet at the apex is not ideal for such a long antenna, but I was surprised with the improvement that I had made. The 30 feet does a pretty good job actually. Higher would be better of course.

I used aluminum wire for the legs on this dipole and I wasn’t sure how it was going to work out. I had always used copper wire before, so I was reluctant to use aluminum.

Now, approximately five months later, I can honestly say that aluminum wire transmits and receives fantastic. It’s a little annoying to work with at first. For example, it wants to coil up on you as you are rolling it out. While this causes a little heartburn, it’s not really a big issue.

In fact, I like the aluminum so well I used it to make an 80 Meter Loop Antenna. I will talk about this classic antenna in another post soon.