
Since moving to Fountain Hills, I’ve made regular use of my old 14AVQ vertical antenna. It works very well due to it being out in the open garden area away from trees and other obstructions. Unfortunately, it has no WARC bands. So just for fun I thought that I’d try adding additional ¼ wave vertical wire elements for 12 and 17m.
I made a couple of thin wooden cross arms and attached them onto the vertical, one at the bottom by the feed, and one up above the 20m trap. I then ran quarter-wave resonant length wires between the base of the vertical and the upper standoff arm using the formula 234 divided by the frequency in MHz. Each wire is spaced about a foot off the side of the old vertical traps, tied up to the upper cross arm with light weight Paracord.
I attached the bottom of each wire to a single screw into the main tube lower section of the 14AVQ. I had assumed that it would change the resonance of the 14AVQ traps, but measurements before and after showed virtually no change. This may be because I used Teflon covered wire (again out of the junk drawer.) I had to shorten the length just a small amount to bring them to resonance in each band. Note that wire with an insulation sheath usually ends up with resonant lengths about 2% to 3% shorter than bare wire.
So how does it perform? Actually very well, so much so that I mostly leave my remote antenna switch on the vertical while I’m just tuning across the bands, 40m through 10m. I also have a HexBeam, 20m through 10m up at 30 feet, but often find myself answering calls on the vertical rather than take the time to switch to the Hex and turn the rotor. The Hex, of course, is usually stronger once turned in the correct direction and has at least a one S unit lower noise floor than the vertical.
So for virtually nothing I added two WARC bands to my old 14AVQ vertical and it gets used every day!
