Building my own balun, part 6: Redo and some success: a working antenna again / 2018-04-23

After the previous measurements showed the balun and dipole under the roof weren't acting as a perfect combination. So time to do a few things better: more windings, less leftover wire and a switch to a voltage balun. Yes, other sources indicate a current balun is better, but I decided otherwise. The Fritzel balun turned out to be a voltage balun after I removed it from the dipole antenna.

So I used the instructions at 1:1 voltage balun by VK6YSF to rebuild it as a voltage balun and I made sure the wires were shorter in the end. Getting the shorter wires in the right places in the case did get me some slightly burned fingers!

Success is currently defined as "I can transmit a carrier on the 20 meter or 10 meter band and the SWR meter of my radio only goes up a few segments" which isn't very scientific, I will need to do the rest of the measurements with the SWR meter to be sure.

Other parts of this project:

• Building my own balun, part 1: idea and parts needed
• Building my own balun, part 2: measuring the 'old' balun
• Building my own balun, part 3: First work on the case
• Building my own balun, part 4: Deciding on where to put dipole ends and finishing it
• Building my own balun, part 5: First tests of the result
• Building my own balun, part 7: Better measurements of the result