Deluxe Tenna Dipper

I knew I would run into Doug Hendricks at FDIM2012/Dayton and I had asked him to put aside a couple of kits for me that he thought would be interesting. I have built several of Doug's kits in the past and I am a fan of Steve Weber KD1JV designs. After a few conversations he came up to the G-QRP booth the following day and with the Deluxe Tenna dipper, Battery monitor and the SOTA tuner.

http://www.qrpkits.com/deluxetennadipper.html

Back home whilst waiting for lunch I put the Deluxe Tenna Dipper together.

I'll replace the photos with my own soon.

The blurb says:

"The Deluxe Tenna Dipper provides a simple means of determining the 50 ohm resonant frequency of an HF antenna or ATU (Antenna Tuning Unit). The small size and battery operation makes the unit ideal for use in the field. It's perfect for antenna experimenters that don't want to tie a bunch of money up in the higher priced analyzers. It's even priced lower than most swr bridges, and this tells you "where" you are resonant, not just that it's matched, or not matched, like a simple swr bridge."

Well it went together quickly and worked first time. I have not put the decals on the front yet I want to paint mine bright yellow first. And I have a feeling I might look at some sort of laminate cover to go over it to help keep it dry as I'll use /P and it is not always dry in UK. Only thing I had to add were a couple pieces of tape and some twisted pair (from CAT5 cable) for the antenna connection.

A quick check with the bicycle ATX-100 and sure enough it finds the resonant tuning for each band in seconds.