By November 18, 2003 I was ready to try my latest pedestrian mobile setup. This marked the day when I was finally free of the big balloons I was using to lift my long, vertical wires. Don't get me wrong. The balloons served me well, and were the only way I would ever be able to use a full-sized halfwave antenna while mobile.

The idea for using a coil-loaded, end-fed halfwave for pedestrian mobile was, as far as I know, first used by Peter, GØDZB, as chronicled in an HFpack posting on Yahoo.com. He designed a physically short halfwave that incorporated two loading coils just as in a shortened dipole, but he turned it vertically and fed it at the bottom. Then the October, 2003 issue of QST arrived with an article by Luiz, CT1EOJ, titled Designing a Shortened Antenna (pgs. 28-32). It gave me all the information I needed to recreate Peter's antenna. And since it was still electrically a halfwave, I could use the same matching unit from my previous halfwave antennas.




How well does it work? Signal reports received seemed close to what I would expect with a full-size antenna. Running five watts here in Colorado I worked Howard, K7HI/mm, who was working as a crew member aboard a container ship. He was 500 miles off the coast of Hawaii and running only one watt! (That was all the power he was allowed to run on the ship at the time.) Below is a picture he sent of his "ham shack."















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