Here’s a brief rundown on my recent adventures with the Buddipole antenna. I bought this antenna to use when out and about in our motor home.

Thanks to Stuart/VA7QB and Ralph/VE7OM for their input and assistance. Stuart has the buddi stick version of the antenna and Ralph uses the Buddipole version. More thanks to Ralph for walking me through the set up a couple of times before I headed off into the wilderness!

I tried the antenna this fall during our trip to Grande Prairie, Alberta.  I used it with the ICOM 7000 and an LDG tuner.  At our son’s home I used commercial power.  At the other locations, I used the battery in our Matrix.  All contacts were made using CW.

At Grande Prairie, I made all my contacts on 20m.  One was in Russia, the others were in the continental USA.

I set up again at North Thompson Provincial Park near Clearwater, B.C. I only made two contacts from there, both on 20m.  I wondered about my  setup location which was surrounded by hills and trees. Both contacts were in the continental USA. One of those was a special event station in honour of the ‘Route 66’ highway.

My last setup was at Emerald Bay in Green Lake Provincial Park in the Cariboo. From there I worked three stations in Finland and one in Italy on 20m. I then worked two US continental stations on 40m.    I was a “happy camper” that day.

First impressions:--It’s fun to use .  It takes a while to set up and I found it finicky to tune.  But it does work.  As an added attraction, it tends to be quite ‘stealthy’ if that is a requirement.

I’ll report back later after I get some more hours on it.