GAP TITAN
For many years, longer than a decade I have been experimenting with antennas. Most joy I won from the quad loop, because this antenna is so simple you can easily build it with a few meters of wire and a wooden mast. After a storm broke it some years ago I was left to think about something different. Well, I also had to finish my studies at Regensburg university and there was my relocation to Munich, so I had too little time to do anything spectacular. A simple long wire had to be sufficient.
But as with all long wire types, they won't have their resonance at the frequency you want to use, and so it started to get on my nerves. Antennas have always been a delicate issue with my parents since they didn't want their garden to look like a giant spider web with dozens of wires hanging in the sky, so wire-based antennas gradually lost their attraction.
One day I took a walk through the WWW and arrived at WIMO - the German representative of GAP. I discovered a web page about verticals. - Having read about the ground plane type before I was a little sceptical first, because GPs require massive traps in order to be good for longer wavelengths and not be too high either. Note, we have a limitation of 10 meters here. If you build up something higher than 10 meters, you need an official permission.
Very quickly the GAP TITAN caught my eye. Being a vertical antenna for all shortwave bands except 160 meters, it perfectly fits my need as a shortwave person. And there's something special about the GAP idea: GAP antennas tackle a very severe problem which occurs with all end-fed verticals. If you don't want to distribute kilometers of wire as a counterpoise in your garden soil, you will have a problem about dissipation, because most of the eradiated power will end up in the ground. Center-fed antennas like the GAP TITAN don't have this problem to such a big degree. They are far more efficient in getting all your power out on the air.
And such a center fed vertical fits quite perfectly in the vegetable patch of my mother!
