Amateur Radio Station K3PP - 10m Terrain Analysis to EU

On 10m, I have two 4 element Force-12 EF-410 monobanders, one rotatable at 84 feet and one fixed on Europe at 40 feet. I plan to realign the lower one to South America for obvious short-term reasons.

With all due respect to the rest of the world, I will show Europe first. When contesting in the northeast United States, Europe is by far the most productive geography, so we optimize our antennas to be loud into Europe.

The high antenna proved to be far too high to Europe during the solar peak, with the lower one almost always outperforming the high one. The plots support this, as the elevation angle was 8 to 10 degrees at the time and the high antenna (red line) was awful then while the low one (dark blue) was several dB stronger.

The plot also shows what I could expect if I stacked the two, which I do not yet do, and also a hypothetical optimim configuration with 5 element monobanders stacked at 30, 45, and 60 feet. Of course, I could do better with more and bigger antennas, but I wanted my "optimim" configuration to also reflect a reasonable cost.

Coming soon