Using Rain Gutter As An Antenna

Mine was a mfj travel tuner.

Using rain gutter as an antenna. It is the rain gutter along the front of a house. And weaker signal from such set up can be heard better in cw. Not long ago i was standing outside looking at my house wondering how best to disguise an antenna when it hit me. Rain gutter antennas amaze me too.

First you have to use a tuner. I use my downspout like a random wire antenna using a commercial transmatch. Also less interference is created to neighbour s tv etc from cw than ssb. It is 80 feet long and off center fed as a windom with a single wire lead in to a tuner.

I got this idea about writing about my antenna because i had one once in the condo that worked very well down to about 40 meters. Second article on the rain gutter antenna. I did use rain gutter as antenna and water pipe as ground it worked great from 160 mtr to 10 mtr. A grc 109 will drive it directly without the tuner on 80 40 and 30 meters and it has yielded good results within.

Mine was a mfj travel tuner. All are waterproofed and have the tuning range to match most rain gutters. It cost about 500 to have 40 feet of seamless rain gutter and two 20ft downspouts installed on the east side of my house. A couple of years ago i had written an article on the use of my rain gutter on my home as my hf antenna.

Below is a photo of a simple effective and entirely covert hf antenna. A piece of 22 stranded hookup wire runs from the transmatch to the downspout and is attached with a sheet metal screw. Very simple and the system worked for me. Rain gutter antennas pic courtesy of n6cc website by grey wolf i got this idea about writing about my antenna because i had one once in the condo that worked very well down to about 40 meters.

However i recommend cw for such installations. Pic courtesy of n6cc website. The best smartuners to use for a rain gutter antenna are the sg 230 sg 231 or the sg 237. I had great time.

First you have to use a tuner. I ve been using a rain gutter antenna for over 3 years with great success no outside antennas allowed here and don t have any trees to hang an invisible wire i use a ldg auto tuner and mine loads up 80 10 mine is about 11ft vertical and then abt 25ft horizontal. The downspout has a vertical run of approximately 16 feet connecting the horizontal rain gutter which is about 16 feet long across the front of the. The rain gutter antenna has a vertical component approximately 25 high and extends horizontally across the roof line for 35.