End fed antennas have worked well for me here in The Villages and may work well for you. A bit of background..

The first time I remember messing about with antennas was in 1947 when I ran a very long wire from our house, across the street, to a tree. (Across a street? Really? Yep.) This antenna fed my Philmore crystal radio, which I bought from the Johnson Smith Company catalog (some of you may remember this catalog) and it worked great. I later built my own crystal set that worked even better.

Fast forward some 65 years and here I am in The Villages trying to rig a good stealth antenna for my Yaesu 450D.

My first attempt was a mini G5RV in the attic over the garage. It worked and it worked well but there were some “issues”....

Issue #1: Running the antenna was a nightmare. Whacking my head on the beams in the attic, punching a hole in my head on one of the nails that was sticking through the roof, and developing major kinks in my back twisting around various roof supports (we’re none of us 18 anymore) and,

Issue #2: Every time I keyed the transmitter, the lights on the TV hutch would key ON/OFF. No problem there, I just unplugged the lights... and,

Issue #3: Ah, now we have the real problem. Seems that the attic over the garage is the cable run for the TV feed and every time I transmitted I’d blow away TV reception; and I want to tell you, when you wipe out the signal for Dancing With The Stars you do not have a happy home. And I even tried a bunch of clamp-on ferrite cores with no success.

OK, time for Plan B. I did due diligence with Google searching for “antenna stealth” and found an end-fed made and sold by a ham club in Hawaii. They promised all band capability, no radials or ground required, and as it was only $44 I thought I’d give it a try. It arrived in a couple of days and it consisted of a 9:1 UN UN in a plastic junction box and 35 feet of dark green wire.

I ran the antenna from a corner of the house to a friendly palm tree and I was on the air... the internal tuner in my Yaesu 450D tuned 40 through 6 meters just fine, 1.1:1 SWR, but it never really worked well on 40 meters and was useless on 80 meters. Trimming the wire to 18 1⁄2 feet improved performance on 20 and up even more. I’d guess I’ve some 2,000 QSO's, mostly PSK-31, using this antenna.

I lived with these limitations for a year plus and thought that a vertical might do better so I picked up an 18 1⁄2 foot S9 vertical by LDG Electronics and a 4:1 balun. Sadly, the vertical never really worked well regardless of how many radials I installed ... my guess is that the location I was forced to use, right next to the house, was the killer for that antenna. The house is stucco and behind the stucco is a steel mesh which I’d bet did the antenna no good at all.

Now a while back, Wally KI4VPD told me about a table that listed “good lengths” for end-fed antennas. With this in mind, I purchased 9:1 UN UN from Balun Designs and ran another end-fed this time with a wire length of 52 1⁄2 feet, again from the palm tree but to a different corner of the house, then a 100 feet of RG-8X from the UN UN to my shack. The company’s recommendations are that you try either:

1.Grounding the “negative” connection on the UN UN,

2.Running a single counterpoise from that negative terminal, length as long as the lowest band you wish to operate on, and finally

3.No ground or counterpoise, just let the coax shield act as your counterpoise. I tested all three configurations and found that #3, no ground or counterpoise, gave far and away the best results for me - SWR 1.3:1 or better on all bands.

Now on to testing the both end fed antennas. I ran both RG-8Xs to a two-position antenna switch in the shack, thence to the Yaesu and rather than trying to have actual QSO's, I fired up WSPR (Weak Signal Propagation Reporter) and let it run on one band after another, power out 5 watts. Results:

•The 18 1⁄2 foot end fed works better on 15, 12, and 10 meters. No signals found on 6 meters.

•The 52 1⁄2 foot end fed works much, much better on 80, 40, and 30 meters.

•While the 18 1⁄2 foot runs East-West and the 52 1⁄2 foot runs North-South, directivity on both seem about the same, good results for all of North and South America, Europe, and occasional Africa and Australia.

References:
The first end-fed was purchased from The Hawaii Emergency Amateur Radio Club, $44, good people, profits go toward club projects:

http://www.earchi.org/92011endfedfiles/Endfed6_40.pdf

The 9:1 UN UN was from Balun Designs, $50 plus shipping. The UN UN is on the following web-page:

http://www.balundesigns.com/servlet/the-102/QRP-9-cln-1-Unun-1.5/Detail

Click on Installation Notes and Wire Length/SWR table on that page for wire-length details. Balun Designs, by the way, is highly regarded in the amateur radio community – check them out on eham.

WSPR – Weak Signal Propagation Reporter – think attended beacon where you transmit for 2 minutes at 5 watts, pause to receive other signals for 8 minutes, then repeat. Everybody on-air using this mode posts the signals received on the internet automatically. You can do a real-time look at a map which will tell you how well your station is doing compared to others in your general area. Good writeup here:

http://www.g4ilo.com/wspr.html

Good luck and 73, I hope a stealth end-fed will work well for you too.

Owen ex-KJ4YAC, N1KAM (SK)