Every year Verulam Amateur Radio Club holds an Antenna ‘Shootout’ Contest. The idea is to get as many club members as possible building their own antennas and then competing against others to see who’s antenna performs the best.

Over the years we have had loads of really interesting submissions, from massive quads to tin-foil and even a usable antenna made from a length of wet string.

We haven’t been able to hold our regular meetings during the COVID-19 lockdown so we can’t hold our competition in person like we normally would. Instead, we have been encouraging our club members to build their antennas at home and send us some pictures and results.

Normally our antenna shootout’s have a theme, and this year is no exception. Quite predictably, our theme for 2020 is ‘lockdown’ which means that entrants can only build their antennas from items they already have at home or in their shack. We also decided that this would be a good opportunity to benefit from the excellent DX operators have been seeing on the 6-metre band so we stipulated that antennas needed to provide coverage of 50 MHz (6 metres).

We will be posting photos and notes from our competition entrants below. Thank you to all of of our members that took part in this annual competition.

Norman (G8ATO) – 6 metre Delta Loop

Peter (G3UHN) – 6 metre Dipole

Peter (G4HSO) – Revisiting and old HB9CV

Roger (M0RBK) – Adjustable Dipole

Peter (G0OIK) – Rhombic Antenna for 6m