The AM Forum

There was some discussion on amfone a while back re antenna icing and attempting to defrost the antenna but no one said that they were successful at it.

I have a horizontal loop that is about 330' around and it’s made up of 12 gauge stranded insulated wire.  The nor'easter deposited a few inches of snow here in central NJ last night and then it froze during the overnight. This morning there was a heavy layer of ice/snow on everything including my loop.  So I decided that this was a good time to try to defrost the antenna.

The antenna measures about 3 ohms DC resistance across the open window feed point back in the shack.  I connected the antenna across a 13.8 v DC supply and it drew about 5 amps of current.  About 45 minutes later the ice was gone and the droopy antenna was back up in the air  :-)

My 75 meter inverted vee was coated in frozen snow so I loosened the center rope of the inverted vee and let it drop real fast to the physical stop (a large knot in the rope). The rapid descent and physical hard stop dropped all the frozen stuff off the antenna.

Sam, that's exactly what I did when I had a 160M full wave horizontal loop. 12 VDC across the feedline and and within 10 minutes she was clean. Wish that worked with a dipole. Even 1KW AM won't clean off the dipole.  :o

Cheers

Paul

Put up a folded dipole.

Yes, a folded dipole is a good idea, but make sure it's not fed with coax when you strike that arc!    ;D

-300 ohms or bust.