End Fed OCF Antennas
Off Center Fed (OCF) antennas are very convenient as they will allow multiple bands of operation with a simple wire antenna which is fed off center. For example, the Palomar Engineers 4010 OCF is a very popular antenna and consists of an off center fed dipole with sides of 55 feet and 11 feet and it will work all bands from 40-6 meters.The End Fed OCF uses the same dimensions but the wire section is 55 feet as in the OCF and the coax outer braid is used for the “other” short side of the OCF dipole. We place a choke on the coax at the 12 foot distance from the matching unit and we essentially have an OCF antenna with its great frequency range, but with only a 55 foot wire length instead of the 66 feet required by the regular OCF. You feed the antenna from one end which may be more convenient for some installations. This antenna will work on 40-30-20-17-15-12-10 and 6 meters. Most bands are under 3:1 SWR and easily tuned by your transceiver’s internal antenna tuner or external tuner used with an amplifier. (see BULLET-4006 for specific details and SWR curves).
These antennas are MUCH BETTER PERFORMERS than End Fed Half Wave antennas because they work the WARC bands, DO NOT HAVE A DANGEROUS HIGH VOLTAGE at the antenna connection and are SHORTER to fit in smaller spaces yet provide more band coverage up to 6 meters!
SLIP-ON FERRITE BEADS
Baluns are used to connect balanced antennas to unbalanced transmission lines (Coaxial cable) and Ununs are used to connect unbalanced transmission lines to unbalanced transmission lines or unbalanced antennas (e.g. verticals). In the case of 1:1 baluns the input is usually an unbalanced coax cable and the output load is a two terminal balanced load like an antenna. Ununs are also called line isolators, feed line chokes, and 1:1 coaxial baluns (incorrectly). 1:1 Baluns and ununs stop common mode currents (flowing on the outside of the coax braid due to skin effect) when they are located at the antenna feedpoint. They can also be used as “line isolators/chokes” anywhere along the cable to suppress flow of induced RF (antenna near field radiation and neighborhood noise pickup) which helps suppress RFI into the radio receiver/transmitter. For best results, put one at the antenna feed point connection, and one at the radio room entrance, and for difficult common mode current cases, one every 1/4 wavelength along the antenna feed line. For low (below 3 MHz) frequencies, use two 5 bead baluns in series to double the choking impedance or order the 10 bead or 15 bead version for higher choking power.