MFJ-1836H, 1500W, 20-6M, SSB/CW, Cobweb Antenna

NOT HAPPY THUS FAR. Will be seeking direction from TEXHST

Just wanted to post a follow up to my prior review. The cobweb continues to perform beautifully.

We've had a couple storms with heavy winds and the cobweb has shown no signs that the wire was in any danger of breaking, so I'm no longer concerned that they won't hold up for a typical lifespan. This is a good antenna. I believe you'll be happy with it.

I'm still going to keep my rating at 4 stars due to a couple construction quirks, but I'd probably give it about a 4.2 if this system allowed such a thing :)

I shop online a lot, but I don't write very many reviews. This product warrants it.

I have struggled badly on HF for years. Due to my lot, I've only attempted dipole type antennas. I won't go into them, but it is sufficient to say none of them made radio enjoyable at all, so I was out of amateur radio for years.

Recently I had been getting a big itch to get on the radio again, but of course when I fired it up I had the same bad performance and noise problems as I had before. I decided to take a gamble on this antenna hoping I could sell it off for not much loss if it was no different. I assembled the unit (more on that later) and tuned it using my antenna analyzer and was decently pleased with the available bandwidth per band on the analyzer (It's small on 10/6m). On 20m it covers the entire band at less than 2:1 SWR.

I stuck it on a 10 foot pole near the location of my other futile dipole attempts and hooked up my radio and was getting a solid S4 noise all across the 20m band. Obviously not ideal, but the antenna it was replacing never got below S7 noise at any time, so it was an improvement and was enough of an improvement for me to be ok with the investment I had made in this antenna.

I wanted to try one more thing, though. The location where this was set up (and the dipoles) was along the side of the house parallel to one set of telephone wires (phone only, no power) and perpendicular to the main phone line. It wasn't what I wanted, but I hadn't heard too many people complaining about phone line interference so I didn't sweat it too much. But just to settle it in my mind, I pulled up the 10 foot pole with coax still attached and walked it to the other side of my lot and zip tied the pole to the side of my fence to hold it up.

I reconnect the radio and power it up and signal meter is dead. Great, I broke the coax. So I unhook from the radio and hook back up to the analyzer and do a sweep across the range and see several dips. Hmm, ok, didn't expect that with a broken coax. I do individual bands at a time and notice each one is tuned where it should be. I'm scratching my head.

So I plug it back into the radio and start tuning around the 20m band. Within a few minutes I had (from Ohio) gotten NY, NJ, SC, GA, and AZ sitting on a 10 foot pole in my back yard strapped to a fence. I was astounded. Turns out nothing was wrong, I just had never had a radio sit at S0-S1 noise and thought something was broken! The last S4 of my noise had been coming from that phone wire, and moving to the other side of the yard got it completely out of my feed. I couldn't put up a dipole on this side, but the cobweb just sits there on a single mast as happy as can be. So to say I am pleased with the performance so far is an understatement. If you are someone like me who has struggled trying to find an antenna that can perform well and also give you pretty omnidirectional performance plus doesn't need a lot of room to be strung up between trees then you really should look at this closely.

Now, about physically assembling the unit, this is why I just can't fairly give this antenna 5 stars even though I really do love it. First let me say that the element wires are all way too long. That's not a complaint but rather I'm glad they made sure there was no possible way someone would assemble this only to find out any of the elements were resonating to high. That's not gonna happen.

The wire itself doesn't feel strong. I didn't break any, and I don't believe any would break just sitting there, but if we get a storm with some winds and it gets to bouncing a little I'm just not sure. I haven't seen many complaints about wires breaking so I very well may be way off, but they just don't feel as strong as I'd like. Time will tell. Also, the end of each wire element terminates in an lug so you need to fan them out to get them to all lay flat and make good, solid contact. This is less than ideal. I wish they would've shipped with a single lug for each leg that all elements would terminate to for each pole. If I ever do end up rewiring this thing I will definitely crimp all the elements to a single connection.

The fiberglass poles seemed suitable to the task. I do want to paint them because I'm concerned the sun will kill the poles in a few years. The poles didn't sag but very slightly. I did not purchase the 40m element because I didn't realize how much I would love this thing, but I will be adding it on at some point now. I can't comment on how the poles feel or sag with the 40m kit attached.

10/12 meter bands: When you're tuning and you get to the 12m band (manual says tune from 20m inward) there will absolutely be some interaction, but it's actually not that hard to get around. By the time you get to this part you will probably be noticing just how much wire you had to trim from the other bands. Assuming you have the same experience I did, you're going to want to cut a big hunk off the 12 and 10 meter bands before you even try tuning. The reason is because the wires are so long that when you are trying to tune the 12m it is nearly resonant on 15m making your readings crazy, and the 10m element is resonant around 12m, further making your readings weird. So you need to trim both of those elements a good chunk to lift their frequencies up and away from the bands below them.

6 meter band: I have not used 6m yet, but I'm actually annoyed with the attachment design for the 6m elements. Due to its size in comparison to the rest of the bands, the 6m element must be placed as corner fed between the two fiberglass poles nearest the matching box. That's fine, but they didn't drill holes in the poles to mount screws to route the elements. Instead they throw a few hose clamps in a bag and want you to cram screws through them and then try to measure and clamp them down while leaning across this thing and blah blah. It was just not a well thought out design. They should simply drilled the holes in the fiberglass for this the same as the others and took all the monkeying around out of it. Not a deal breaker, but annoyed me. Oh well.

So, some quirks you should know going into this antenna, but honestly I am very happy with what I have already gotten from this. Hope this helps.
K8KPO