This is my first antenna build and I want to do a fan dipole that covers at least 80, 40, 20 and maybe 17 and 10m. I have a 50 ft length of RG-8x with PL259s already soldered on. Can I first feed the dipole with homebrew open ladder line and then use a 4:1 balun to attach the coax and go into my shack? If I can get the antenna up 40-50 ft. I won't have enough coax to get to my radio, hence the ladder line. I also read that using ladder line allows me more bandwidth. I'd like to use the SSB and digital mode portions of the bands.How do I determine how far I should space the width of my ladder line for a homebrew version? |