I've had a Hustler 5-BTV antenna for about 2 1/2 years and it performs relatively well. I thought I'd share some of the info on the anteanna, how I installed it and the recent modifications I've made.
To a degree, multi band vertical antennas are always going to be a compromise. When ground mounted, unless you have an extremely high water table for conductivity, your antenna is going to require a counterpoise and when I fisrt installed it, I made an effort to lay down a decent amount of radials for the 5 bands the antenna covered. These were 10-15-20-40-80m. The first three bands are acheived by traps, one for each band and 40m is acheived by loading the entire antenna along with the aid of a capacity hat. Finally, a 80m vertical resonator sits on top of the mast to provide "very narrow" operation on 80m.
For the ground plane, I selected the DX Engineering radial plate and laid down 34 radials of differing lengths to match the bands the antenna covered. The first picture show the DX Engineering radial plate along with the radials when the antenns was first installed in early 2014
The antenna has perfromed well for me. I have really good resonance on the 5 bands although 80m is extremely narrow and I've never quite been able to bring the SWR down much below 2.0:1 around 3.7Mhz but the other bands have been very good.
One of the things I missed with this Hustler was the lack of the WARC bands. I'm not that interested in 30m but I do like 17m & 12m so it was always my intention to purchase the DX Engineering add-on kits for these two bands. They looked very easy to install but I was put off by the high prices being asked for them. Each kit was coming in at just under £80 which I wasn't prepared to pay.
It was then that I came across an article on Hamuniverse about an easy and cheap way to add these bands.
http://www.hamuniverse.com/4btvto17meters.html
Basically, you were adding a 1/4 wave vertical for each band. So I thought I would have a go at this and see if I could add the two bands to my own antenna. At the same time, I was wanting to experiment with a coaxial choke because along with it preventing RF from travelling down your feeder and into your shack, they can also make your antenna bandwidth resonance that little bit wider.
Here's the picture of the choke in place.
Modification to the antenna to add 12m & 17m below showing the cane, antenna wire running horizontally across and connected to the live of the antenna.
Final couple of pictures showing everything in place and the full antenna with vertical radiators for the two bands.
So I now have a 7 band vertical and have good swr across the bands. Job done!
What about the choke and did it actually widen the resonance on any of the bands? Yes, it did. What it did actually do was flatten the swr curve so instead of having pronounced dips, I now have a flatter response so all in all, I am very pleased.
Hope this was of some interest to you.
