Fritzel FD4 OCF Dipole
Fritzel FD4 OCF Dipole The Frizel FD4 Windom is an OCF (Off Centre Fed) antenna that has been around for a long time. The original Windom antenna (devised in 1928-29), named after Loren Windom, W8GZ.
The Fritzel FD4 antenna is a classical antenna in our series of HS4 Legendary Multiband Wire Antennas. It covers 7 bands, 10-12-15-17-20-40-80m. Unlike typical antennas, this is a non-resonant, Off Center Fed Dipole (OCFD) antenna. The performance characteristics are quite outstanding. The antenna consists of asymmetrical length horizontal radiating elements being driven at the feedpoint through a 4:1 broadband Balun and a 50 Ohm Coaxial cable. The principle of a Fritzel FD4 utilizes the asymmetry of the element lengths for taming the SWR to workable limits.
This antenna does not essentially need an antenna tuner for proper operation. The overall gain on all bands is good with adequate low angle radiation for great DX. This antenna is deployed at a height of 12m (40 ft.) above average quality ground and the design accounts for ground absorption losses, antenna wire insulation dielectric losses, other structural losses, etc.
The most important feature of this antenna is that it produces nearly omnidirectional azimuth pattern with moderate gain and moderate gain ripple on most bands which is practical for copying and working DX in all directions. However, the owner of this antenna will still need to find the optimum direction of the radiation lobe on each band to leverage the main lobe which provides maximum gain. This may be on either side of the default beam heading. It may either be achieved by experimentation during the process of familiarizing the antenna characteristics or by referring to the exhaustive set of specifications with graphics and gain map given below... Happy DXing!