In August of 2025, after having success with toroid coils on the magloop, I thought it'd be interesting to try such a coil on the 6-meter dipole again. While it did work, the upcoming exterior maintenance on our building prevented much more exploration on the balcony.
My next project in July of 2025 was a “magloop” antenna targeting the 40-meter and 80-meter bands. Since our balcony is very small, no other antenna options would realistically work here.
My first feed attempt was with a coupling loop, which didn't work at all, most likely because of all of the metal in the vicinity.
Next up was a toroid coil, making the whole system into a transformer.
Another feed I tried was a gamma match. (I'm not sure why I didn't immediately pursue the toroid coil route when it worked better than the coupling loop.)
Since the toroid coil from earlier worked better, I ended up going back to that route, albeit with far fewer turns, which almost worked!
My final choice of feed for this incarnation of this magloop was “The Doohickey”: a box with a switch between two different taps on the toroid coil, as the impedance match needed to be different based on the desired frequency range.
And it was paired with the addition of a second vacuum capacitor to bring the resonant frequency of the loop down. (I intended to put a switch on that could add or remove the second capacitor, but I've yet to get to this at the time of writing.)
After asking some of my radio friends on Fedi about what would be good for 2-meter on my balcony, I went with their suggestion of a J-pole antenna back in July of 2025, which was really easy to work with from the get-go!
Because it worked so well, I'm still using it to this day, albeit with an improved feed line, but that post will be up later.
In June of 2025, In order to increase antenna bandwidth considerably over the wire dipole, I switched to some copper piping that I bought from the hardware store, cut, soldered wires onto, and painted.
This one also featured a 1:1 current balun with an old cannabis jar enclosure.
Because of the low feed point impedance, I also tried a 1:4 current balun, which didn't work at all for this purpose.
After discussing with DD8SF, I tried a twin coax feed, which almost worked!
My next antenna (April 2025) was a basic wire dipole with a sleeve balun.
It also didn't end up working well enough for my use on the intended 6-meter band, unfortunately.
Back in March of 2025, I got my first full transceiver, a Yaesu FT-991a.
And at the time, I thought using a G5RV I'd bought off DX-Engineering would work for our little balcony.
Needless to say, it didn't work at all. Knowing what I know now, it would've never worked when set up like that.