Yesterday, for a change we had some good weather even though they predicted rain! So I quickly got the 70MHz halo antenna from the loft and mounted it outside on the same mast I use for my Diamond V-2000.
The 70MHz halo is a commerically made antenna I bought from a company in the UK (Moonraker). Following there measurements I was able to get a match of 1.6:1 but it's not until I done a larger sweep on the AA-600 analzyer I noticed a better dip around 67MHz at 1.1 so at some point will need to make the halo elements shorter and fine tune it again.
Even so the beacon has been running for the last 24hrs and I have received two reports via email from stations approx 25miles away. Jeremy M0XVF can hear the beacon but at the moment struggling to decode the FT8 and Terry G1LPS can receive FT8 and CW loud and he's also using a halo. Today Terry emailed saying he found the beacon very useful to do some tweaks his end and now receiving the beacon at +10.
This is one of the reasons I set up the beacon as it will hopefully help people carry out the necessary checks/tweaks to there setup.
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