This is a brief description of the antenna I use to give me coverage from 160m to 30m. Its not a pileup buster but it does allow operation on the lower bands from a 20ft square garden area.
Its a short, ground mounted, remote tuned, centre loaded vertical, based around a HiQ 5/160 mobile antenna from http://www.hiqantennas.com/ Overall height is around 16ft (4.8m) and I have added two EB8 capacity hats mounted one above to improve performance and enable continuous coverage between 160 and 30m.
The most important part of any vertical antenna system is the part you can't see - the radials. The lawn area in front of the antenna is covered with chicken wire mesh and is overlaid with 30 wire radials of various lengths. This was done a couple of years ago and is now completely invisible the grass having grown over it again.
How many radials and where to put them always seems to raise more questions than answers but I think this quote sums it up quite well,
"The biggest difference you can make is with radials. The shorter your antenna, the more important it is to have more radials. They don't need to be long, they don't need to be uniform, they just need to be there. More is better, longer is better, more is more important than longer."
The feed point is connected to a TRSB balun http://www.buddipole.com/trraswbat.html and MFJ-927 remote tuner.
Upper section of antenna showing the two EB8 capacity hats
Antenna base/feed point.
The box to the right is waterproof and contains the atu and balun.
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