It was a warm afternoon thanks to the recent chinook that moved in. In typical fashion it brought a lot of wind which made me think about what antenna system to deploy. I recently acquired a Paktenna end fed half wave (EFHW) and thought it would be just the tool for the job.
The antenna itself comes with a nice S carabiner which makes it easy to hoist into a tree with appropriate strain relief. I paired this with the Elecraft KX2 as EFHW’s require a tuner and was quickly off and making contacts.
Ease of deployment rates highly as my arborist throw line effortlessly took care of any of the hassles associated with setting up other forms of antenna systems. One needs to have multiple solutions depending on terrain but if you know that there are tress where you will be playing radio a random wire in a tree is hard to beat.
I was able to activate the park in under 30 minutes with a nice distribution of contacts throughout the United States. I’ll be investigating other antenna systems from Paktenna in the near future but if you want a great antenna that is ready to go out of the box look no further.
