Barbed Wire Fence Antenna - Improvised Field Comms
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 30 ก.ค. 2024
- Can you really tune up a barbed wire fence and get on the air? Let's find out together. Lessons will be learned.
SUPPORT
Membership - www.buymeacoffee.com/thetechp...
One Time Support - www.buymeacoffee.com/thetechp...
0:00 Introduction
2:25 Digital Fail
3:07 Getting on the Air
6:43 After Action Report
STORE
shop.thetechprepper.com
GEAR
* MFJ-9201 Tuner - mfjenterprises.com/products/m...
* Cobra head - amzn.to/3JxcrAK
* 20 AWG stranded silicone wire - amzn.to/3DZwVhT
* 1/4" Ring Terminals - amzn.to/3Ytv5y7
* #6 Ringer Terminals - amzn.to/3Y6l8Wd
* Alligator clips - amzn.to/3KClYH9
* Crimp Tool - amzn.to/3YKZoQL
* NanoVNA - amzn.to/3YobsHG
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
#thetechprepper #antenna #prepper - บันเทิง
Here is a suggestion for the laptop. The Coast Guard uses an A, B, C system to status assets. Thinking of a boat or helicopter, if it is underway, then it is in A or Alpha status. If it is at the dock or on the helipad fueled up and ready to go but with no crew aboard, it is in B or bravo status. An asset in Bravo status can typically be underway in 15 minutes. C or charlie status is for an asset not currently ready, undergoing maintenance, or waiting on parts, for example.
If you marked your gear with a similar system (stickers, grease pencil, etc.) then you would be unlikely to grab an item in charlie status (not ready to go) when you are in a hurry to get out the door.
For your kit bags, any time you have taken something out of them, for whatever reason, clearly indicating that they are in charlie status, could save your life if they were to be used in an emergency.
Thanks for taking the time to share this suggestion. I plan to implement this system given the amount of equipment I have on hand.
This is still a win in the lessons learned department. I know this was a lot of work to do - thank you for all you do for the community.
You're welcome. It was a really good receive antenna.
This was a great lesson. In a grid down or a situation where communication is important. Sometimes talking isn't the best option. Listening is. Relevant to this situation, this long wire set up would allow you an opportunity to gain Intel from a great distance with what appears to be easily hidden infrastructure.
Well done Gaston! Call this a win.
Excellent point. There is tremendous value in gathering intelligence.
A close friend of mine spent most of his military career in a special forces unit as a commo sgt. I heard many stories of the hits and misses using wire fences as antennas. Keep at it, it can be done, sometimes rather easily and sometimes it ain't happening as my buddy would put it. Again, many thanks for your hard work providing these videos to the community. It's one thing to read about a technique in a FM, TM or other sources and think "oh, that's easy enough. I can do that" but you continue to show us there is a huge difference between reading and doing.
That's part of the reason why I took on the Improvised Field Comms series. I wanted to see how well some of the literature stacks up in the real world. Sadly, I received a ton of hate mail from hams on this one. I'm glad that I attempted this exercise. There's nothing like running real-world experiment. Thanks for sharing your friend's experience. Take it easy.
@@TheTechPrepper I also have friends from the Army that can mirror that experience. It's so surprisingly prevalent that many uneducated RTOs often just rig their HF radios to up to whatever metal is around and let the tuner match it and call it good enough, or even use the supplied vertical long whip laid horizontally on the ground. These are pretty awful ideas to those of us educated on antenna theory, but they get away with it because their equipment lets them, and connections are made!
A chain link or barbed wire fence is certainly not an ideal transmitting antenna, (though you showed how decent of a receiving antenna it can be!) however when using a Military HF radio which includes an integrated ATU, and running 3G ALE, it essentially does all of the work for the operator, from finding which frequency will work the best to matching the impedance of whatever is attached to the antenna port. It becomes far more difficult to use makeshift objects as an antenna when you have to do that work on your own.
Thanks for getting out there and trying, interesting video as always! I'd think this might be worth another try if you ever get the chance and will to do so.
@@VeteranOfSojuWars I plan to give this another go. I have a new prototype for a field-expedient antenna (T2FD) that is designed for ALE. No tuner need and under 2:1 across the entire HF spectrum. I plan to experiment with some civilian ALE software called ION2G later in the year. Thank you for sharing your experience.
Good stuff. Kudos on your transparency on fails. Still important info.
One issue for transmit on a random long wire is that whatever power does get out as radiation is going to be much more directional than your dipole, and you don’t have control of the direction. This will limit your connections. On the other hand, a long wire receive close to the ground can be a fantastic receive antenna because of its high signal to noise ratio (and you don’t need a tuner for that). Most portable rigs don’t have separate receive and transmit connectors which limits the usefulness, but could come in handy.
There's nothing to hide. Things going out of plan is life. I was hoping for NVIS and an omnidirectional, so it's good to know that the radiation pattern is more directional. Thanks for the info!
Isn’t that more like a beverage antenna? Long wire close to the ground. Best listening antenna around.
@@LetsGoAmateurRadio You're probably right.
That's definitely a McGyver or A-Team antenna idea if I ever saw one. 😁. Really neat that you tried that. I bet you could find ways to make it work for transmitting.
Thank you for sharing your idea. It definitely was a good learning experience for us here too. Quite inspirational.
Stay safe and happy hamming everyone. 😎🙂
If you know someone who can do CW, have them accompany you on some of these. It would be an interesting test to see if they can get out when voice and digital can't.
CW is essentially a digital mode and is good for weak signal communication but JS8 is better. JS8Call can reliably decode a signal that I can't even see on the waterfall. I think it's good for -20 dB for reliable comms and -40 dB SNR for hit-or-miss decoding. SNR isn't the best method to evaluate efficiency and reliable transmission. If we consider the energy per bit compared to the noise power in 1 Hz (Eb/N0), digital modes look much better than CW and JS8 is one of the best.
CW Advantage - No computer required
CW Disadvantage - CW capable operators required
It would be nice learning CW. It's been on the list of to-dos for the last year or so.
It's never a failure as long as you learn something. For receiving AM broadcast stations fence wire work great! Hoping to catch you on the air one of these days. Thanks for sharing and 73!
I hope to catch you on the air, too.
That is actually pretty cool. I like hearing the shortwave and like you were able to pick it up
I am glad you share your failures as well as your successes. 7200-7300 still has some SW broadcasters in it. I think they are not supposed to be there, but there is no way to stop them. I had always wondered about barbed wire as an emergency antenna. Thanks for this video;
they're not supposed to be in 7200-7300 khz in IARU region 2, thats the americas. region 3, asia, has tons and its perfectly legal there.
You got out and played radio. That's a 100% win in my book Tech Prepper. Pity about the laptop but thanks for sharing :)
The field laptop has a shiny new label to indicate which one is the field laptop versus the development laptop. Take care.
This is part of the fun of experimentation. I've learned more from my failures than successes.
As long as you learned, it was a win.
This is AWESOME, I think we need some more improvised HF antenna videos 🙂
Noted! Thank you. I'll keep an eye out for opportunities to improvise antennas in the field. There will likely be a couple more in the future.
Good data. Thank you for taking the time. This will be one thing for me to skip. Appreciated.
You're welcome. It was too much complexity in terms of gear with no real return. Maybe others have had a different experience?
Thanks for testing the barbed wire. We know know we can use it as a listening antenna just in case. 👏👍
Don't take my word for it, try it! I am good with just listening. I'll stick to traditional dipoles. If it came down to it for a real life emergency, I would have taken my multitool and cut the barbed wire down to two 33' elements and made a real dipole.
It might have worked for voice comms had you brought the FT891 along and operated at full power. Perhaps having the PC configured as an SDR receiver having a MFJ switch to go back and forth between the transmitter sending and shutting down the SDR to prevent it getting fried by the transmit power going through it and then switching back to the SRD radio receiving. The SDR DUO has diversity tuning where you can rig a second antenna which can give you the ability to tune out receiving unwanted signals. Yes it becomes a bulky and somewhat complex system, not a lightweight hit and run station if you are trying to avoid getting your location triangulated. This is the direction that I believe that I may try and go off of a motorcycle with sidecar as I am disabled and cannot hike off road any distance. First my priority will be getting my mobile set up with a screwdriver antenna working properly on a 4wd vehicle. I enjoy your exploits and learn from your success and mistakes so keep up the good work.
honestly as subscriber content (as opposed to someone looking for direct answers to direct questions via youtube, which I've done a million times) I appreciate this kind of "win some/lose some" stuff.
Glad to hear it.
Carrying all that equipment is not nonsense. It’s ham radio experimentation.
Shit happens🤣 and it’s good so.
Tried a fence on a mountain a couple of days ago with my G90 and I could make 2 non random contacts on ssb.
It was in the early morning hours on a distance of 280 kilometers. But as you remarked, the RX was exceptional.
Thanks for your „failure „👍🇨🇭
You're welcome! Congrats on your "fence" contacts. This is solution is definitely not for me. There are better ways to improvise antennas, IMHO. 73's
An old Elmer of mine talked about once using an old chainlink fence rail somewhere in the Caribbean. He claimed to get good performance from it but they were definitely running maximum legal power with a super chunky tuner.
I love stories like this. I guess you can brute force anything with enough resources. Thanks for sharing.
Cool video, it seemed like a nice day to be out playing radio. A collab with K0KLB really needs to happen at this point!
Despite the issues, the fence makes a pretty good long wire receive antenna. One could easily imagine camping near the fence and just clipping a radio onto it to do some nice short wave listening in the evening.
I'll have to checkout K0KLB's videos. Thanks for putting his channel on my radar.
1 QRP Nebraska to Idaho for me on 40 with a long wire and gel batteries. Lesson learned: More Power Supply! Had to try it tho.
Great video! I live in Utahs' West Desert, will be trying this out soon.
Good luck!
Good stuff.
Great video thanks!
Glad you liked it!
When I was running a LRS Team we used AN/GRA-50 antennas on our prc-104 radio. With those antennas we couldn't have any vegetation touching the antennas wire or it created issues. Like you we could hear but had issues transmitting.
Thank you for your service and for sharing some of your experience. It's nice to have another data point on how this setup works in the field.
Going to Scotland in May I've been before where we go there is a field surrounded by a stone wall with barbed wire on the top im going to give this a try. I tied it in the Yorkshire dales 40m into South of England about 300 miles 5 and5 80 Watts ssb
Enjoy your trip and the experiment! 73's
This is a follow-up on the Coast Guard ABC system after seeing your short. In your short, you use Alpha for something in the shack that is all ready to go but not deployed, etc.
What your revised system lacks is a category for assets currently in use. For example, do you have a permanent antenna at your house? Under the CG system, if it were up and fully operational, it would be in alpha status. If the wind blew it over and broke it it would move to charlie status. A spare antenna in your garage ready to deploy would be in bravo status until you put it up and then it would go to alpha status.
What I did not mention is that at a CG station, there will be a whiteboard on the wall listing ALL assets with their current status written next to the asset. The advantage of keeping such a comprehensive master list is that if you loan an HT to your neighbor it remains on the list and is statised, thus minimizing the chance that you will "forget" about it.
Thanks for the follow-up. I am making some adjustments based on my requirements, but the Coast Guard ABC system is a great framework and starting point. I agree about maintaining the lists. This topic (with my spin) will likely be the next video. I'll be sure to give you street credit for the topic. 73's
When I used to do router firmware development I would write the firmware version on a piece of tape on the top of the router. Saved me a lot of trouble.
Nice and sample. I switched to mini Avery sticky labels. Works great. Thanks for sharing.
@4:46 You might have done better with a straight CQ. If someone saw you on the waterfall and tuned across, it sounded like you were already in a QSO with someone. If you're looking for a random contact, (and at this point I think you were, being in "salvage" mode,) CQ is the tool for that job. 73 - AE4KR
Excellent point. I opened with many CQs throughout experiment. This was a poor choice of an edited video clip that I included. I tried calling CQ a half dozen times.
Wait!...How well would it work for local 2M / 440 frequencies?
I watched a video vitro that compared different wires including barbed wire, copper clad, copper insulated and not and they were all comparable
Rant Approved.
More Hamgyver experiments please!
I'll definitely do a few more this year. Thanks for the feedback.
The Windows toughbook was feeling left out. Need to do a windows 10 setup as well. Coincidentally, I have a toughbook running windows 10... 🤔 😂
I was the first thumbs up!
You sure were!
for the win!
Cheers! Great job. Thanks for the support.
I live on property in Texas. LOTS of barb wire. Some of the wood posts remain, but mostly metal.
However, there is an electric fence made from an insulated single wire. Not high, but long. Hmm....
The electric fence will likely work. I built one out of it a couple of videos back, but I cut mine down...
The cows are still here, so no cutting, but I will shut down the charger for the test.
May I suggest using CW and carrying a simple key? I bet you would have hit more than one reverse beacon.
Great suggestion. Will do!
You should have tried a quick pota activation
It's interesting. I am always in a national park, but have never done POTA. I'm usually a SOTA guy. That may have yielded better results.
I would expect your uninsulated fence Is finding ground fairly quickly so the element might be pretty short.
Actually, this particular barbed wire fence was selected specifically as it never goes to ground and has no conductive posts. It's was 300ft in circumference.
@@TheTechPrepper understood I thought I saw green grass or bushes touching the wire.
Still like you said all the gear to tune it is heavy, great video
@@bhamptonkc7 That's a good point. Yes, there could be contact from some of the grass and bushes. Good catch.
If you are carrying 31 ft of wire, I'm not sure I understand why you would try to use the fence wire as your radiator. You already have a good radiator. In that scenario, I would connect the tuner at the far end of the coax, then connect the ground side of the output of the tuner to the fence wire, and connect the 31 foot wire as the radiator, getting it as high up in the air as possible. Perhaps give that a try?
It might get out OK, but the point was a contact 50 miles away. Verticals generally don't do NVIS well.
I found very little information on how to turn a barbed wire fence into antenna when I researched this topic. Some of the research I found when looking into long wire antennas suggested using a counterpoise of this length for 40m. I'll give your suggestion you try. Thanks, Adam.
@@paulplack490 I didn't suggest a vertical, just getting it as high off the ground as possible. Assuming you use what's around, that's plenty low for NVIS. And for 50 mi, ground wave is likely a better bet anyway, so perhaps a vertical would be worth a try as well if you had a way to get it straight up.
@The Tech Prepper I wouldn't expect to find info on turning a barbed wire fence into an antenna, but you can still apply some basic antenna design and construction principles to be successful. A barbed wire fence is a long steel wire with ground rods (t-posts) every 15 feet or so. You need that RF to go up, not just into the ground.
40m is a good DX band in the morning. Working Asia from the Southwest is pretty easy on the band, and strong broadcast interference is common from 7.200 to 7.300. You can avoid it in the lower portion of the band. 40m would be a poor NVIS band that time of day. 60m or 80m would be a much better choice.
Your tuner may very well have enough inductance to tune up the 31 ft wire on 80m with a ground like the fence. With it 8ft or so off the ground, it will likely be efficient enough to be effective.
@@K6ARK It looks like I have to do a bit more homework, but I am glad I still went out and tried. I did go out of my way to select a barbed wire fence that was not grounded. There were no metal t-posts as this fence was constructed entirely out of wood from the 1920's.
How about an coax switch. Use barbed wire to receive, and another for transmitting?
That would be good for the home, but probably be too much for these temporary field antennas, IMHO.
@@TheTechPrepper More stuff in field, more stuff to goverong.
ft8 possable with a win.10 machine?
Yes, it is.
@@TheTechPrepper what program then
What radio is that please?
It's the Yaesu FT-818ND.
While information out wasn't made. You were able to listen to stations around the world. Information IN can be more valuable.
I agree. Listening and intelligence gathering would be wise over transmitting in a lot of scenarios.
Sounds like a Chinese radio station. Ni hau ma 😁
All good if you still learn something, that's how you learn.... but Windows caused a no-after-action report. :)
It was helpful learning the limitations of using a barbed wire fence. The field Toughbook is now properly labeled. I knew that label maker would be useful. 73
Did you pick up Colonel Kurtz?
Kurtz went radio silent after he watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor.
Color code your laptops. 1" x 3" construction paper and packing tape - top and bottom.
Great suggestion. They are labeled now.
You’re right that if you’re improvised antenna gear is bulkier, heavier and more failure prone than a spare wire antenna then it doesn’t make sense to go that route over the spare resonate antenna. Having said that, the fact that you couldn’t make a SSB contact with 8 watts is hardly proof that the fence doesn’t work as a radiator. I’d say you wrote it off with too little evidence.
The Tech Prepper
----GASTON .i was one Bob Johnson's Computer Stuff Inc TH-cam CHANNEL.and i see you a Panasonic Toughbook CF-33. for ham is it as good as the cf-20 ?????
Sorry, I do not know. I don't have a CF-33.
@@TheTechPrepper Sorry i misunderstood what i was reading.I spoke with Bob Jackson and he recommended the
Toughbook CF-31 MK6 Intel Core i5 7300U 2.60 GHz
Panasonic .for ham radio..i just wanted to know if you would mind telling me what else besides the radio and the digie rig i would need to build e-com tool's set up like yours THANK YOU. sorry if its too much to ask for.73 have a great day.---Chuck
Bonus comment: booo windows! Amen brother. I bought a registered copy once to redo a laptop, the updates took 2 days, and there were hardware conflicts. Every boot of troubleshooting was >10 mins
In another life I supported Windows, now it's Linux!!
PCI PCS
Good fun, and yes sh1T happens!
Yes, stuff happens. It was a nice morning anyhow.
I'm pretty sure that the station at about 3:57 was actually Japanese, but no matter. Good on you for putting the barb wire fence antenna through its paces. No such thing as a "fail", just feedback. 🙂 73 VK2SKY
Thanks for the correction.
You just need to label your laptops. Masking tape and a sharpie are the low-tech way to go.
Great suggestion. It's labeled now.
If you take a Sharpie and write JUNK in big letters on every Windows computer then you will be sure not to grab the wrong one again. ... Computers are Like Air conditioners . They are useless when you open windows.
Agreed. Solid plan.