I bought a VX-3 at the Ham Fair in 2007, and have always taken it with me whenever I’ve attended radio gatherings since then.
One day I had to go on a business trip to a different part of the country, and I thought I might want to get out of the hotel for a bit, but the whip that came with it wasn’t powerful enough…so I made this Hentena.
This blue-green “mast” was a Delta Loop spreader that was used on the IOTA vacation tours to KH0 and V63. The other of the two broke at the exact same point, so it was discarded and left to sleep as junk.
Then, I discovered that the VX-3 antenna has an “SMA connector.” I’ve used it a lot since then, and even got a special crimping machine, but when I first bought the VX-3, I wondered, “What is this small connector? Is it a custom-made part for a whip antenna?”
So, I was looking around for a light weight support that would fit the SMA-P connector that I was going to insert here, and that’s when I found the other half of the Delta Loop.
I made the aluminum pipe for the element by gently bending it with a pipe bender while heating it with gas. It takes some getting used to bending a thin (0.5mm thick) aluminum pipe at about 15R like this. I bent it and broke it several times.
Although I did make it, I don’t have many opportunities to use it…