The late LB Cebik is well known in Amateur Radio circles as an innovative antenna designer, this paper presents five of his antennas - the  broadside doublet (No. 1) will be of particular interest to Amateurs looking for a small multi-band antenna. This antenna requires a capable tuner and needs to be fed with ladder-line - don't be put off by that, make your own ladder-line, it's easy, cheaper and more robust than commercial products.
Five antennas from LB Cebik

This is a very simple off centre fed dipole antenna, the ferrite rod balun is not the most efficient but works well enough up to 25MHz or a little further. The antenna will cover 80m to 10m at full size and 40m to 10m for the shorter version.
Simple 80m OCF dipole (NB. This is not my antenna - see side panel link for mine)

A four element Yagi for 2m. A zip file with details of how to make a collapsible aluminium Yagi with 6dBd of gain. An excellent antenna for the traveller.
Travel Yagi for 2m

And the excellent software by John Drew (VK5DJ) which I used to calculate the dimensions for the above yagi.
Yagi calculator

Does just about anything you need with Maidenhead grid locators:
Maidenhead grid

This site runs some very clever software to analyse VHF+ signal propagation from any given location. It requires you to establish a login but only in order that your settings are remembered. If you do any 2m or above work it is well worth using - it produces pretty pictures via Google Maps.
Radio Mobile

A small programme (270kB) to calculate parallel/series resistor values from the 'E' series
ResCad

"Spice" is computer simulation of electronic circuits and an excellent piece of free software to do this is produced by the semiconductor company Linear Technology - if you haven't used Spice you have been missing a LOT!
LT Spice IV
Click on the link "Download LTspice IV for Windows" (or Mac). Also download the "Getting Started" guide:
LT Spice Getting Started Guide
And here's some more help:
LT Spice help

EIBIview
EIBIview is a schedule of commercial short wave broadcasts and provides a considerable amount of information including power and a graphic of antenna direction. It is a rather crude piece of software and its Windows 3.1 origins show through clearly. This is version 3.0 from 2017. I have messed around with it a little to bring its data files up to date - my messing is documented in "ReadMe.txt" files. I suggest you install "EIBIviewJF.zip" which should work OK.
Left click at the top of its window to produce a menu. Despite its shortcomings EIBIview presents a lot of complex information very well. My thanks to "Tobias" who, it seems, wrote it. Download size is 2MB.

An excellent tutorial from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology covering HF propagation:
Introduction to HF Radio Propagation

A couple of low cost but excellent products (NB. I have not used these E-bay sellers):
Red Dot RF power and SWR meter:
Red Dot SWR and power meter
I paid a very competitive A$50 delivered for mine but I think you will be lucky to get one for less than A$70 now They make two meters, one for HF and one for VHF/UHF and as far as I can tell with my uncalibrated RF test gear they are certainly accurate enough for Amateur use. The meter is supplied with 'N' type connectors (as it should be) so you may need a couple of adaptors too.





Inductance and capacitance meter:
L & C meter
A terrific piece of equipment, it looks and feels like it's been made in someone's garage but does it's job well. It will measure a wide range of both L and C values (<1uH to mH or more? and <1p to 10,000u+) to within a couple of percent - I tested it against a very expensive calibrated professional meter and was very surprised how well it did. If you make RF baluns, filters or chokes this is a must. Shop around and you should get one out of China for around A$40.




Page last updated November 2017