Since my move from our farm, I've had friends help me put up my old faithful Hy-gain AVT 18 Ground mounted vertical. The antenna was NOS when I purchased it many years ago at the Ham Fest in Morganton, NC. I've owned it for like 25 years and over time it gained some issues I hadn't known until late.

Since installing it we've added the 16 ground radials Hy-Gain recommended. I also re-wound the 15 meter coil which always gave some troubles due to being broken and to short. Years ago, I did a quick fix just to get it back on the air, this time I hand wound the coil with solid copper wire. The antenna had other issues like a broken Top Hat which I repaired using Stainless Steel Weld rods, worked perfect. 75 meters, is tuned for the higher end of the band with an SWR at 1.6, 40 meters is tuned for the middle of the band with an SWR of 1.2, 20 meters I still have issues with and I believe I will be re-winding that coil also when health allows. 20 meters at present is set for mid band with and SWR of 1.9 with a short band width. 15 meters is my favorite band and band of choice so I was very careful with my settings on this band with an SWR measuring a tad over 1.2 which is well within Hy-gains claims. 10 meters so far has been the flattest of all bands with an SWR reading so low my meters do not even register as it's less than 1.1 on 28.300 mega-cycles. The band spread is all the way into the 29 mega-cycle range with an SWR of less than 1.5 which I thought was pretty good considering an old man did it. ME being the old man!

I've used this antenna a many of times but never before as I have now. I quickly realized with all the improvements and modifications We had done, I was really onto something. If you are thinking it's a vertical and no use for DX work you'd be very wrong, where this antenna really shines in, is with extremely long distance hops. You're going to be disappointed with a vertical if you want to talk within 450 to 850 miles and you're wanting good signal reporting or really if you want to talk in the states for that matter.

My DX experience with this antenna after all these years is fantastic. If I can hear them, I can normally talk to them with a good signal report and this is me going up against stations running at times well over a 1000 watts of out put. I am running a Yaesu FT-900 at 100 watts normally although sometimes I use my FT-847. I dust out the old W4DLO Icom 706 MKII when I really want to have some fun! That old rig has been beat around, carried about, moved a million times and keeps right on ticking! Thank goodness for that! Tuff radio by anyones standards!

Normally, I don't bother with reporting things of this nature but in this case, I have to boast a little. I am very proud to own this old antenna not just because it's a real Hy-gain but because of all the work my friends have done to help me out. Our next gig will be to mod the antenna for 17 meters, I found some information on that. I will attempt the re-winding of the 20 meter coil and use solid copper as mentioned when my health allows that.

I really think even though the antenna is mounted on the ground and no radials are needed here because I have good grounding. I think when we added those 16 radials for each band it really helped the old girl get back some of her designers plans. She got back her swing!

From what I understand, adding anything less than 30 radials is a total waste of time, anything less than a 120 some odd radials is where you are really supposed to be, In this case I would have to totally disagree with that theory as it sure made some differences here.

However, this antenna's base pole is 7 feet long and driven down into the ground with only about 20 inches remaining out of soil. The antenna is grounded again with 3, 6 foot rods as well as another pipe. Each radial is grounded with a 4 foot ground rod at the end. We used bent copper wire to stake the radial wires down even closer to the ground. So in case of mowing those should not be any problems. So all that extra grounding could have made some difference and improvements on reception and transmitting before we even added the radials, however I can't say because I hadn't had the chance to test it out prior to the installation of the radial system.

So, I have tooted our horns here, I think we've done a great job. Hopefully some of this information might help newer hams or older ones wanting to try out a vertical antenna on HF.

That's my story, I am sticking to it. We counted to 3!

God Bless
KE4CIJ