*PRODUCT REVIEW* 23DA330 Jeremy’s Homebrew Quad

QSL-23-DADx Adventure Radio Club (DA-RC) member 23DA330 Jeremy, from the diminutive Caribbean island of Jamaica, has proven what a little bit of innovation and willpower can do to conquer having a lack of resources at one’s disposal.

Jeremy, whom has been building quad antennas for more than 30 years, created a novel 3 element quad antenna using everyday materials found around the home, dispelling the view that you must have wads of cash to put yourself in a position whereby DX is readily at your finger tips.

23DA330 Jeremy had an old washing machine and was hoping, when he scrapped out the motor, that it was a model he could rewire. Unfortunately it wasn’t, however it did provide something equally valuable! Jeremy was able to remove about 145′ of #19 copper wire from the old discarded washing machine motor which provided him more than enough wire to create 3 square loop driven and parasitic elements.

23DA330 Jeremy found enough 1 1/2″ hollow section to splice and get 12′ “which is great for a 3 element”.  He then fabricated angle iron and attached bamboo spreaders to complete the configuration.

The spreaders are Chinese fishing pole bamboo, wired to 10″ long pieces of 3/4″ aluminium angle, bolted to the boom. Jeremy did not use any transformer on the feed as the only 75 ohm coax he had had an aluminium wire shield and he did not like the idea, so just connected it straight to 50 ohm, soldered to the driven element.

23DA330 Jeremy reports that the SWR is below 1.4 from 26.800 MHz — 27.700 MHz. A 5/9+20 signal report with an operator in Ecuador (61 Division), and 5/9 from an operator in Paraguay (67 Division) not only confirms that Jeremy’s innovative homebrew creation excels but validates his efforts to fire up his station again after a period where cultivating medicinal plants, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds and herbs dominated his time.

“Not the prettiest, nor the fanciest,” concurs Jeremy, “but it’s up, standing firm and withstanding a hard breeze every day. And we got 50 mph winds, gusting to 70mph, so everything was shaking and waving around!”

The first ever quads Jeremy built, back in the day, were just lengths of bamboo titled across each other and tied to linger pieces of bamboo, and telephone wire. History shows they worked a treat. Jeremy’s success in quad making can be traced back to his early years, a time when some early quad antenna publications captured his imagination.

These days, he combines traditional methods and materials with modern technology, using one of the many online calculators to assist with calculations. “I guess it shows that you don’t have to ‘build fancy’, as long as you want distance and push on dx…” he said later.

“Hopefully it will take some of the mysticism out of building full wave antennas.” “This build also proves,” says 23DA330 Jeremy, “that as long as you use the correct measurement of wire. The rest hardly matters, as to semantics. It’s all in the spread.”