My first experience with a cubical quad antenna came long before I earned my Amateur Radio license in 1987.
The year was 1970-something and my best friend and I were big CB radio fanatics. We both had ground planes at 30 feet at our homes; he had a JC Penney transceiver, and I operated a Citi Fone SS, a 23-channel rig built in the 60s by Multi-Elmac.
The Citi Fone SS was a neat rig because it was full synthesized — it covered all 23 channels, which was quite an accomplishment given my previous CB radios had been Hallicrafters CB3A and the more deluxe CB-9.
More on those rigs later.
A CB friend of mine who lived in rural Hardin / LaRue counties here in Kentucky was Bill “Shirt Tail Bill” Waddell. He was a truck driver for the old Smith’s Transfer based in Louisville, and a CB repair guy. He lived in a mobile home on a clay and pine tree ridge off what was then a winding rural rock and gravel road.
Anyway, Bill was one of the first people I met on CB; it just so happened that my CB-3A had channel 12, and that was the channel Bill and a neighbor of his, “Speedy” monitored.
Bill had a substantial “linear” amplifier, but he also had a cubical quad antenna on the top of a tall pine tree he had cut and converted into a mast. I was amazed at the front-to-back and side rejection of his quad. I visited his home a number of times to have my radios “tweaked” or modded, and I marveled at his antenna.
From what I recall, Bill’s cubical quad was similar (if not identical) to the GEM Quad, though Bill’s quad did not have but one set of elements for 11 meters. I lived about 30 miles from Bill, and I was always impressed by how his signal would change when he moved his beam away from an easterlly direction.
Bill’s quad sparked my interest in building a homebrew antenna, and that led to my introduction to a 1972 copy of the ARRL Handbook in our local library. And of course, the handbook had a quad antenna construction project, and plugging in the numbers in the formulas, I came up with the proper measurements for an 11 meter quad.
I found the necessary wire, cut plexigas parts needed for spacers, and found appropriate bamboo poles that were the centers of carpet rolls. The problem I had was building the hub; lacking someone who could weld, I couldn’t fabricate a hub. My woodworker father and I worked on building a wooden hub, but we couldn’t figure how to mount the parts together to form a solid hub that would strap to a mast.
Our cubical quad antenna project became the talk of the town for quite a while among our fellow CB’ers. Some of the more “competitive” CB’ers quietly asked my friend and I to consider building quads for them, as they were always looking for something “better” than the standard 2-element yagi.
The cubical quad wasn’t the only project that caught my eye in the ARRL Handbook. I checked the handbook out repeatedly and pored over its pages. It was my first real introduction to ham radio, and it lead to me and my friend enrolling in a General Class theory class the following year. We completed the class but because our teacher never covered how to learn the code, we never realized there were cassette tapes available to help you learn the code. Thus, my entry into ham radio was about 10 years later.
RS-918 UPDATE. I had time this evening to spend quality time with the RS-918, and I spend considerable time setting up the DSP filter settings. You can set 4 filter settings for SSB and 4 for CW. A 500 Hz filter is pretty much my go-to filter, but under certain band conditions I’ll use 300 Hz. I also like to have a wider filter available to punch in to get an idea of how crowded the band may be.
I used the RS-918 again for my CW net, and it worked fine. The receiver is comparable to my FT-950, and its no slouch.
73 es CUL …. de KY4Z … GN …. SK …. dit dit …