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L-shaped 120 meters sloper

By Jose M. Valdes R., YV5LIX
Special for hcdx, 5 June 2002

This antenna is in fact a "sloping long wire" that I use for SWL with excellent results in the MW and SW bands. Signals are quieter and better than on a dipole cut to the frequency in use.
Because this antenna uses a tower, as part of the support and radiation system, it is not an antenna for everyone, but never the less it may give you some interesting ideas to work on.

The antenna is a 120 meters long wire layout on a "L" shape to fit in a medium size city lot (see illustration).
It slopes down from a 15 meters tower (that support my amateur radio antennas, and acts as a capacitance hat), to a 9 meters high mast located 40 meters away from the tower. and from there diagonally to the back of my lot for another 80 meters.
To make the tower some what electrically longer and to provide a more omnidirectional pattern, six random length radial are attached to the bottom of the tower, the end insulator at the end of the antenna is at 3 meters above ground, and for better performance I use an antenna.

One interesting feature of this antenna is that it is very good for MW DX. Some of the loggings made at my QTH in Caracas, Venezuela, can be heard here, :
1460 kHz -- Nuevo Continente, HJJW, in Bogotá, Colombia. [92 K realaudio file]
18940 kHz -- believed to be Radio Afghanistan [251 K realaudio file], heard on May 31 2002 at 1400 UTC, the first day that this new signal was heard with a regular program instead of the test fanfare that was heard the previous days.
These recordings may give you an idea of the very good performance of the "sloping long wire".
As you may know, Caracas is not the best location for MW DX due to the great amount of local MW stations.
But with a good antenna, interesting logs can still be made.