Experimenting with a low dipole on 160m

      It seems to be well known that a low dipole is a "cloud warmer," and it appears a vertical is the way to go for low band DXing, especially on 160m. But I had a hard time finding much for actual results that people achieved with low dipoles. I'd read about people trying them, and a couple being surprised how far they got on 160, thinking you'd be lucky to get 200 miles... I felt the same from what I had read about the importance of height. So I'm sharing my experience to add another reference/data point for others. 

I strung up a full size dipole for 160m with cheap 18 awg wire and a BNC to binding post connector. I only had a short 20ft RG-316 feedline, so I had to bend 1 leg of the dipole to fit in the property. One leg was about 124 feet straight, the other was mostly straight for about 50 feet, and bent about 85 degrees for the last 70+ feet. I put it up with the ends and the center about 13 feet off the ground...plenty of sag on the longer run, probably 2 ft+.  See EZNEC diagram below:

I was doing this to try out my newly built QRP-Labs QDX-M for 160m, and had it feeding Hardrock 50 amplifier. Was getting about 47w out with about 1.4w in.  

I worked 160m FT8 for 2 nights while staying at my cabin QTH where I did this experiment. Not all night by any means, but from near sundown until I went to bed, with breaks here and there, and then for an hour or so when I woke up before sunrise.

Results over those 2 nights: 161 completed contacts in 97 grids; 38 states worked as well as 4 Canadian provinces. Longest contacts were over 1700 miles to British Colombia, California and Oregon. Shortest was about 50 miles.

QSOMap of contacts:

PSKReporter shot of stations that heard me on night 1:

There was one station in Israel both nights that heard me as well, but that was the only DX station reporting me... and I heard one station in Mexico, and a couple in Spain...otherwise everything was in the US and lower Canada.

While I confirmed what we already collectively knew: a low dipole won't work on 160 for DX...it worked better than I expected on stateside FT8. On the other hand, if this were SSB, I think I would've made about 9 contacts instead of 161... Only 8 in the log had +8db reports or more in EACH direction.

So there you go... a full length, but bent dipole 0.024 wavelengths off the ground, combined with an amplifier and FT8 did OK.... Something I may keep in mind for a bit of an "extreme" POTA activation in the future. More importantly, it confirmed my QDX-M worked, and worked well. 

Some other notes: When I moved from the dipole back to my 40m Horizontal loop at 34 feet up... noise and signal levels on 160m dropped by about 12 db. And AM broadcast stations were overloading the front end on my KiwiSDR at night when fed by the large dipole...I barely see this on the 40m loop. Just interesting to me to note how much stronger receive is on lower frequencies with that longer wire!