In a nutshell, the MFJ-1714 Long Ranger half wave telescoping antenna works better than our homegrown Yagi, takes up less space than the ET-style groundplane and is a breeze to use in seconds. It reaches out as far and produces excellent TX and RX. Frankly, we only discovered this by accident-- quite literally.
We built our homemade groundplane on Tuesday, finishing it up at 6 pm that day. We ran a preliminary test from our backyard and then took it out to what we call Windmill Ridge east of town Wednesday afternoon. For some reason it simply wouldn't work. And we were having trouble getting the Yagi to work as well. We were very frustrated and packed up our stuff and drove off. When we were almost home, we realized we left the groundplane out in the field at our test site. So, we turned around to fetch it. When we arrived at the site, we looked and looked and couldn't find it. Sadly, we finally found it. We ran over it when we left and we totally flattened it.
As we sat rather dejectedly there, we thought we might as well try out little MFJ-1714 Long Ranger. We popped it on the HT and put in the freq for the Jump Off repeater 65 miles away. Much to our abject amazement, N7TDC picked up our signal and we carried on a great QSO on three freqs. I was amazed at the power of the MFJ-1714 Long Ranger. I hadn't even thought it possible the little thing would be so powerful and had never bothered to test it here!
The following day I decided to go west of town and try to hit a repeater 69 miles far to the south with the Yagis. No luck. At that point, I thought, "Well, why not try the MFJ-1714 Long Ranger again." Much to my surprise once again, it produced a great signal and we had a great QSO with W7GIB in Downey, Idaho! At that point, I was sold and convinced. I went home and pulled the Yagis out of the Samurai and kissed them goodbye.
Friday (yesterday), we did a 164 mile backcountry road trip through some remote parts of Southeast Idaho. While on the dirt portions of this long route, we saw only a grand total of 3 vehicles---so we're talking remote here. While out in the boonies, I decided to test the HT and the MFJ-1714 Long Ranger once again off Sedgewick Peak and, lo and behold, KF7LUB answered from downtown Logan, Utah! (QSO with KF7LUB shown in photo at top of blog.) You can click here for an account of the trip.
At this point I no longer plan on carrying a Yagi on our road trips--unless it can be shown to me that a Yagi can outperform the MFJ-1714 Long Ranger. I am very pleased with this antenna and it fits perfectly in my "go kit" along with the GPS and the digital voice recorder, old-fashioned compass, various maps and freq lists, etc. My next blog post will show the contents of this kit.
Many readers of this blog will undoubtedly remember the opening scene of the Lone Ranger's TV series. The Masked Man is riding his white horse while blazing away at imaginary villains. The words to this song were: "A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty Hi-Ho Silver--the Lone Ranger." Now, whenever I pull out the MFJ telescoping antenna, I head the melody to that theme song and I've morphed the lyrics to:
"A fiery handheld with the speed of light, a cloud of TX
and a hearty Hi-Ho Signal--The Long Ranger!"
By the way, I did get the groundplane back up and running the following morning and therein lies a story. I set it up in the front yard and ran an antenna check via the local ERARC repeater on Iona Hill (146.64). N7TDC answered and we had a great QSO. He became curious about the groundplane and said he would like to build one. Since I had a lot of leftover welding rod, I said come on by and pick it up. Sure enough, Terance C. stopped by within the hour and we had a wonderful FTF meeting and chattered together about all manner of HAM topics. THANKS, Terance, I am looking forward to meeting with you again. The photos below are of the groundplane on Wednesday before is became a FLAT groundplane as shown in the last photo!
Have a great day, Many Cheers & 73! jp
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