so this is it's kind of a pre-launch video really of the 12.4 signature which has been
in development now for a couple of months in the field i had released a few videos
but i'll put some cutaways in this one so you can see what the hell i'm on about right
a bit of a show and tell for you because we're going to be launching 50 of these as a special
introductory price but let me tell you what it is so first of all it's on this 40 foot
12 meter-ish pole we've got seven elements going up there so the seven elements
uh start at 80 meters so we've got 80 40. i don't need to go through all the seven elements
we've got a coil uh just over halfway up for 80 meters and if you've listened to some of my live
streams over the last couple of months you'll know that's been going great guns right couple
of things i want to run through i'm going to talk later on the video and this is only a short video
but i'm going to talk about 30 meters and 10 because there's a decision to be made there
however i've got a technical solution i'm working on we'll run through the plate set these are the
bits that hold all the elements up before we do that what i want to do is just to cover the topic
of whether this is self-supporting or not i don't believe in its current form it is and
the reason being is when we put an aluminium pole up the inside of the tube to support it
worked absolutely great other than the fact that 12 and 10 meters had a completely flat swr
and all our energy was probably going to ground okay so that's no good so i've got mine guide
right now we're working up a technical solution and i've spoken to brian at barenko in fact he
watched the video of the self-supporting hinge and by the way you can get brian
so this is the hinge effective that we bought brian watched that video and he has made me
without me even realizing a prototype which will suit better for tilt over he wants me to stock
these and ship them to the us as well brian does ship to the us regardless so tilt over
or not right now it's not i've got three guys at about 20 feet or six meters good so that's
covered whether it's self-supporting or not right let's go through the plate set now because this
is absolutely for these all prototypes in fact that is off the classic so that's a classic plate
which we use on the ds commander classic and that is the guide plate as it so happens
now i want you to show you just for sizing all right we'll move these out the way as we
go through it that's a little spreader actually that's for the 80 meter 18 meter nebula and when
we did when i did all the prototypes these is what i used i also use this radiating plate here
for the development of the 12.4 and you'll see why i'm showing you this in a minute because that's
also the ground plate we used now i've spoken to tyler and tyler done some drawings for us tyler's
k7 tdm he's on the channel as well and we've come up with this huge plate hopefully you can see
that on camera number two but if not i'll hold out for camera number one look at the size difference
of the the ground plates just because you know it's a permanent solution we can it's still in
three millimeter 5251 aluminium but that is the size of the ground plate nice and big and easy
but what i'm what will assist us even though i've got great swr curves the um size of the
radiating plate has gone up in fact that's roughly the size of the 80 meter nebula plate
there but what will make the difference is when we get the separation on the elements so this is
right the first spreader so that is the size of the classic fur spreader right there look
at the size difference between this and the 12.4 is truly massive and that's because the cage of
wires will go out further so we'll get even better swr curves i mean i'm really comfortable with the
as it is but it'll go even better okay so that's the plate set there are five nylon plates in total
tyler has drawn it out for us here and as you can see here they're not circular they're
not well they're kind of octagonal as well but they've got some lovely curves to them
so that is the second spreader and they gradually go down in size
third spreader and then we go to to this as well there's the fourth and the fifth so very nice
so we we these are to scale i seem to remember yes so that's basically almost a copy of the top
of the nebula but then we've got um an even smaller one up here as well good
so in terms of swr then i'm going to be really comfy but it's also going to
help with the next topic which i want to talk about which is 30 and 10 because at the moment
30 meters right which is some 10.1 megahertz now technically that will resonate on three
times that frequency that's the next time it will resonate as a three-quarter wave
so that would be 30.3 in reality it's a little bit higher say 30 and a half
now on the classic we have a 40 meter element and we fold it back and what happens is 15
meters comes down from 21.6 to 21. we lose about half a megahertz and it doesn't affect 40 meters
so i've got an experiment to do where we build a 30 meter antenna effectively fold it over and
keep cutting it until the maths work out how much of a fold-over do we need to do 30 and 10. the
advantage to that is that on a moderate ground 10 meters is going to behave somewhat like a 5 8
not quite but it will resonate and it will behave very similar to a grounded
you know with a ground map 5 8 and we'll still get a fine tune on 30. now if i can pull that off
that'd be fantastic because we're also getting a perfect tune on six meters as well if i can't pull
that off then you will make a decision i suggest what you do is you build a 30 meter element and
use the 18 80 you button for 10 because let's face it a lot of us have got like cb antennas and other
options for 10 meters because you're heading nearly into the vhs spectrum it's great and
we when we went to the hills and we did our little dx fest a couple of years ago with tom and tim and
myself we ran a load of stations on a 10 meter quarter wave so i'm not saying you can't do it
it's just a lot of us have got options for 10. that's if you want 30 just use your atu
button but trust me i'll work very hard to get that solution in i just wanted to say so
this uh price of this is going to be about 350 pounds that's about 450 plus shipping it's going
to be the thick end of 500 and i thought what competitors have we got in the market that you
could get a vertical and do that well there's only one really apart from that um is it the 6bt
thing with all the loading coils but the trouble is beyond about 20 meters we start losing a lot
of gain as as as you go down particularly to 80 you know you've lost i don't know
90 percent of your power or something but i did actually look at the uh the big the big ir mark
five four four yeah four vertical antenna and i just selected you know normal options
uh with an 80 meter coil and that comes out at two and a half thousand dollars so we could buy five
of these for one of them and we'll be supplying all the radials for you as well you've still got
to add that on incidentally uh step-by-small ir they do a smaller one they do a 20 to six
and that comes out about 1500 pounds but you could buy the rapide for that you can remember the
advantage of a dx commander is there's no moving parts no circuitry and if you wanted to play
whisper for instance you could just set your radio and go every band right for 24 hours you don't
have to touch a thing there's no re-tuning nothing just a bit of a sales pitch there
all right this is just a there'll be another video in seven to ten days with the actual
launch the link for you to buy okay as i said we're only launching 50 right now because
there's a lot of work for us we've got to saw some boxes and and that sort of thing all right
so in the meantime have a great time i'm using my signature 12.4 myself my prototype my home brew
with all this drilled out and so on i can't wait to get the original components through
and the plastic plates arrive either today or tomorrow and we'll get the allium aluminium
plates next week and then i'll build one you see i'll build one kind of with you so
when you're buying you go okay i know i'm buying now all right cheers and beers guys all the best