After installing my first HF attic dipole and noticing that I can hit Alaska and the Carribean really well and can’t hear New England at all, I decided I want another that is perpendicular to it (then maybe I’ll hit New England and Arizona… and Hawaii!).

I decided to do this antenna a little differently.  Consider it an experiment.  While I went to a lot of great lengths to put traps in my prior antenna (which shortened it’s length considerably), I decided on this one I want to try window line and see if the interference problem caused by my plasma TV is different.  If not, I may be off of 40 and lower until I replace the TV with an LED TV.

Since the window line will be going down along a ventilation shaft that’s pretty large, the one concern I have is that I can’t put metal conduit in the shaft (one thing I wanted to try was to put a grounded metal conduit in the ventilation shaft and see if that fixes the interference problem).

So anyway, the pictures are below.

This is the stress reliever in the center insulator. I drilled three holes in a 3/4″ PVC coupler and used two wire ties to ensure that there isn’t too much stress on the wire joints.

This is the insulator in the center of the dipole. The long wires were soldered to the twin-lead. The PVC coupler allows for me to hang it via mason’s line.

The two sides of the dipole – wires at ~33′ each – are coiled around CLOSED coffee cans, and the window line is coiled. Everything is taped with masking tape so it can be removed easily. The cans have to be closed due the insulation in the attic – open cans would get insulation in them, closed cans do not.

This was the only picture of the installation I could get. Let’s face it, it’s a wire in an attic, it isn’t going to be easy to see nor show anything interesting. Hope that metal plate doesn’t create a problem (there’s one on the other side too, so at least the metal plates will balance out).