Trap Antennas
2018-10-24 I've been playing with trap based inverted vee antennas for some time now with good success. I very much like the band-switching simplicity. They do have a somewhat narrower bandwidth than a single band inverted vee. They also can be quite complicated to tune, particularly if you go for more than two bands. But they are a good antenna and quite educational to make.
I began by making a dual band trap inverted vee for 40 and 20 meters using light weight trap kits from Sotabeams in England and very small, 26 gauge wire also from Sotabeams. It worked well so I decided to add 30,15, and 12 meters. That got very complicated but I do have it working with a tuner. I sort of gave up on getting the traps for each band to match exactly and the lengths of the wire between them exactly right. I simply got tired of all the trips to the yard and fiddling with the traps.
I subsequently bought a 40 and 20 meter kit from QRPKITS. It uses axial wound traps rather than toroids and was quite easy to make. I'm very pleased with its performance. So give a trapped antenna a try. You may just like it!