Miracle whip

The miracle whip is a qrp portable antenna witha maximum tx power handling of 25 watts. It has the convienience of attaching directly to the back of your rig , turn the variable inductor switch for maximum recieve noise, check swr and make any adjustments and your on the air. The miracle ducker TL which i have has the added advantage of a removeable whip section allowing wire antennas to be run from it. The TL has a setting for v/uhf where the whip alone is used giving 1/4 wave or 3/4 wave lengths. Does it work? well some swear by the miracle whip and some say there no more than an expensive dummy load. Im going to do some tests and see what i find. I have a homebrew atu ( see atu section) which has a bnc fitted on the top which can be used similar to the miracle whip so i will try and do some comparisons with both devices.

I made a homebrew miracle whip a while back and found although it did infact get a good match to the radio it was very sensitive to anything around it and to be honest never gave it a real and fair crack of the whip before i rendered it useless as an antenna and got rid. Below is my atu that can double up as a miracle whip to try some comparisons against the two in time but for now i will concentrate on testing the miracle whip using my ft817 .Im not expecting any real impressive results with this antenna especially on the lower hf bands and even on the higher bands im a bit unsure as to what its going to perform like. It being portable,lightweight and convienient are all plus points for this little device but again performance is another matter. I am going to try with the whip section and also experiment with a few lengths of wire from the bnc along with/without counterpoises.

does it work?

Well the first test i did was to see if infact it will find a match to the radio.The miracle whip did in fact find a match on all bands it quoted as being able to. Tuning was simple and quick by first peaking the rx noise up and making slight adjustments after that for optimum settings. The recieve was very impressive especially on 80m where i thought it would be useless but it seemed to pick lots of signals out. So my first evaluation of this as a recieve antenna bearing in mind its size is very good indeed especially if you are truely restricted for outdoor antennas or simply to rx. It states the whip can be used with or without a counterpoise which as far as tuning goes is correct and i found by adding a counterpoise sometimes made the matching a little harder but had no noticable effect on rx.

how does it perform on tx?

tests to be done..