Operating Under Hostile Environments
The one outstanding problem is the antenna. How to conceal a good antenna is one that has faced the subversive ham for years. Fortunately, there have been many solutions and some have been shared and some have not. The obvious, such as the flagpole vertical has received much notice and been covered in many past articles. The small wire long wire has also been written up and there have been some really interesting antennas made using the small diameter wire. The problem with the small diameter wire antennas is they are not physically very stout and birds can take them out. And a light covering of ice or hail storm can also bring them down around some one’s ears, usually the wrong person. So there is a need for alternative and equally concealable antennas that don’t cost an arm and a leg which works.
Here are some interesting alternatives, some of which are very novel and concealable while some are obvious, but not suspect. All work, some better than others, but they do work. What you use is going to depend on what you are faced with and what you have at hand. Once again, your situation and ingenuity are going to determine the end result.
The Slinkytenna
The slinky, as everyone knows, is a long limp spring that looks like a bunch of piston rings that were never cut apart. It is cheap and available all over the country, and possibly other parts of the world. By supporting it from a catenary line and stretching it between two supports, it can be made to operate as a long wire, (?) of sorts. You can suspend it from a vertical support and use it as a vertical of some sorts. It can be draped around a room, suitably insulated of course, and loaded up. You do need a good antenna tuner to match the thing to your transmitter. It might be hard to explain why you are carrying a slinky in your briefcase to an airport security guard, but that is where your ingenuity comes in.
One ham used a slinky by fastening a line to a clothesline and then using the clothesline to haul the line and slinky out between his apartment and the next building. He could only operate at night, but that was fine. Another ham would drop the slinky out the window of his motel, holding it away from the building with a pole made of PVC that he would screw together, and then load it up. So you can see the slinkytenna can be put to use in a variety of places and in a variety of ways. Keep in mind there used to be two sizes of slinkys, large and small, so make your choice accordingly, if you have a choice.
Cartenna
Many years ago when transmitter hunts were on 75 meters, one ham had the task of hiding the transmitter. So when time came up he went to a friend’s house who had a car up on blocks. He then hooked the antenna terminal of the ARC/5 transmitter to the car, after he buried the transmitter in a hole under the car, and loaded up the car on 75 meters. It worked very well and he would have completely defeated the transmitter hunters, except a passing dog made a mistake and the resultant howls tipped off the hunters that there was something funny about that car. The fact that the car arced to the weeds when the transmitter was keyed up and the wind blew them against the car body also caused comment.
There was a ham that lived in a mobile home community that had underground everything, cable TV, power lines, and telephone lines. NO outside antennas were allowed, not even cb antennas. The ham with an Icom 735, bought a AH-2 automatic coupler and every night hooked the coupler to the car bumper. He had disguised the coupler and ground connection to the coupler very well, and told the curious he was having trouble with the battery and had to keep a charger on the car until the “dealer could solve the problem.” There is no record of how well it worked, but the nightly skeds with another ham several hundred miles away were kept year round, with good reports on ssb. His identity and call shall remain a secret, as he still lives in the same community, and does not want to draw any attention to himself.
Housetenna
Another ham lived in a very exclusive and high-class neighborhood that also forbade any low class thing such as antennas, unless it was for a satellite TV system. After considerable thought, the ham built a small utility shed, one of the “all metal bolt it together yourself type” such as sold by Sears and Montgomery Wards. He used star washers between each sheet as he bolted the thing together, in order to get a good electrical connection between the sections of the walls and beams and the panels of the roof. It was mounted on teflon blocks that were bolted to the wood pilings.
No one paid any attention to the little house that stood in the middle of the large back yard, nor did anyone say anything about the small wooden building that had “PAINT STORAGE” printed on it. There was even a length of conduit that went to a lamp in the small paint shed that was there to keep the paint from freezing or otherwise being damaged by the cold. No one knew the small building had an automatic antenna coupler built into its base and the conduit was the rf connection to the building, which was being used as the antenna. It worked very well, particularly on the higher frequency bands.
Clotheslinetenna
There are two versions of this type antenna, one for the clothes line that goes between two buildings and one for the back yard clothes line, the type that is strung between two T poles. There are several other versions, but these two are the only ones that we will talk about now.
The between two buildings type was done this way. When the clothes line started to show signs of going bad, a new line was fastened to the old one and pulled through the pulley on the other side, and back to the window. There it was, crimped with a copper band to the other end and the new line was now a loop like the old one, going between the two pulleys, like any good clothes line should. No one suspected the polypropylene black rope had a heart of copper painstakingly threaded through the rope with the use of a fid. And that the copper band was where the sneaky ham hooked his antenna coupler to the antenna and worked all over the world on a disguised antenna while his underwear flapped in the breeze. There is no information as to how the presence of wet clothes helped or hindered his signal.
The T-pole clothes line was treated a little differently. All of the lines were tied together at both ends and an AH-2 automatic coupler was hidden in a wooden box labeled clothes pins with a connection made to one of the lines. It worked well enough for the ham concerned to get WAS in 13 months and several contacts with VK and ZL stations from the east coast.
DDRR Tabletenna
Another ham resorted to another disguise. He had a large table top game board in the shape of an octagon made out of PVC pipe. It could be used for ping pong, giant checkerboard, and a whole lot of other games, and it could be moved around fairly easily. The ham lived in a condo and next to the top floor, but couldn’t have any visible antennas running from his balcony to the roof. It didn’t matter, as the PVC had a heart of copper in the form of a DDRR Dipole made from copper tubing that just barely fit inside of the PVC shell.
The ham had a motor driven vacuum variable capacitor inside of the PVC and all that he had to do was to connect the coax and the control line for the capacitor, and he was ready to go. He left it on his balcony a lot, and no one was the wiser.
Downspoutenna
The use of downspout such as used to carry rainwater from the rain guttering that surrounds houses in some parts of the country is not uncommon. Many hams have soldered sections together to make verticals. But one ham used it in place on his house where it did double duty as a vertical mounted on the house on insulators. And at the top, there was no connection to the rain guttering, as it was spaced about 1/4 inch from the rain guttering. The ham had his shack in the basement, so he ran a short lead through a window to the bottom of the downspout. He couldn’t operate in the rain but didn’t seem to think it was any problem since the basement was prone to slight flooding when it rained.
Treetenna
The use of a tree as a support has been done since the first ham threw a rope over a branch, but a few years ago the government came up with a device that allowed a living tree to be loaded up as a transmitting antenna. Not too much has been said about that little deal, but it would be interesting to find out if it was ever very successful. Someone loaded up a tree by driving a big nail into it and hooking it to the antenna coupler. But, the results have been lost in the many years that have passed.
A tree has been used was as a support for a vertical dipole, when a ham on a second story ran his coax out to the tree and ran the elements up and down the trunk. He used an antenna coupler to take care of whatever swr showed up due to squirrels and various other things that showed up from time to time. It was omn-idirectional of course and the only problem came when the leaves fell off in the fall and his deed was exposed to the world, if the world noticed.
Commercial Portable Antennas
The commercial hf portable antenna market is rather limited, with MFJ putting one out and B&W also marketing one. Basically, these antennas are collapsible base-loaded very short whips, with a base loading matching unit and/or loading coils for each band. Usually for 20/15/10 meters only. Performance is mediocre to crummy from the on the air comments heard. There are others, but not too many that will fit into a suitcase to not arouse suspicion when you check into the Managua Hilton, or the Moscow Ramada. There may be some excellent portable antennas on the market, but chances are they are only for the top-secret deep cover stuff, but, “only the shadow knows.”
Operating and Antenna Considerations
The important thing to keep in mind when operating from a motel, or other non-sympathetic location, is that QRP is a very good idea, since you never know what equipment is being used in the next room. All you need is for the laptop in the next room to start playing the star spangled Morse code to cause a room to room search for the culprit. Worse still, getting into the cable TV system would almost guarantee you would be forcefully ejected from your room, possibly through the window, by irate football fans with help from the soap opera crowd. It might be a good idea to see if any rooms on the ground floor are available when you check in to prevent any undue damage if things get hostile. Also, you can make your escape easier if the mob starts looking for a suspect.
Alternate Antennas
The alternative to bringing your own antenna is to use something that is already in place. One ham managed to successfully shunt feed a balcony railing. He managed to keep all of his skeds with his wife 1,500 miles away with reasonable success on 75 meters at night using ssb. He was on the top floor of where he was staying and even though the railing was rather long, it worked. Don’t hook onto the cable TV system though. That will be a sure death stunt.
Power lines are out as is anything hooked to a power pole. You never know what will come zapping down the wire. If you do hook to something tied to a power pole, it just might be death to the infidel, with you being the infidel. Things are not always as they seem when it comes to power poles. A point to keep in mind is that any sort of conductor within 1/4 wavelength of the lowest frequency you are on is going to affect your antenna and consequently the radiated signal. The presence of any conductor is going to absorb the rf from your antenna and be very detrimental to your signal and the possibility of causing rf burns on the hide of anyone that comes into contact with whatever it is that is eating up your signal. Again, low power is the best way to go to be safe. Anyhow, we should use only enough power to make contact and maintain the circuit. Yes, twenty meters has enough excess rf to raise blisters on the sun during contests and when rare DX is on. But in the case of clandestine operations, QRP is the safe way to go.
One last antenna example is the fishing rod antenna. In reality, the system works like this: The rod isn’t used as an antenna, but the reel has the antenna hidden under the monofilament. Daiwa makes a real dandy little spinning rod called the Mini-Spin that comes in a nice fitted case and doesn’t take up much room in a suitcase. Using several spools with a different 1/4 wave length of wire on each spool, all that you would have to do is change spools and, either cast the line over a tree limb, using a practice casting plug or a very small 1/4 or 1/2 oz. sinker. Or, drop it out the window until the correct length is hanging off of the rod tip. Then load up the wire. A good ground is a definite requirement. Both to properly load up the antenna and keep rf off of the rig and to prevent TVI.
An alternative to the multi-spool trick is to have a spare spool filled with fine wire that can stand some abuse. Either lower enough to make a 1/4 wave, or cast the weight over some distant branch and load up the wire, reel and all. Once again, the importance of a good ground and an antenna coupler and operating QRP cannot be stressed enough. If you do use the fishing rod trick, be sure to carry a mini tackle box with all the prerequisite goodies that fishermen carry, with the exception of some stale bait. That might be carrying things a little too far.
If the ideas presented here have given you enough thought to work with toward solving the problems of operating in hostile territory, keep in mind the secret to success is moderate QRP, 100 watts or less, hidden or disguised antenna, and stealth. If they can’t see or hear you, they can’t find you to shoot you.
Originally posted on the AntennaX Online Magazine by Richard Morrow, K5CNF
Last Updated : 13th March 2024