CHA EMCOMM II

9/15/2023 Update.Living in a dense, urban area has a lot of QRM, and it recently got real bad. So I moved the antenna to the other side of the house, and pointed the axis of the antenna opposite the source of the noise. I also replaced the 58’ element with one that is 80’, to make it an EFRW. Wow! This antenna now exceeds the SNR of all my loop antennas. I live in the Northeast, and can now routinely receive South zkorea, mainland China, Thailand and New Zealand on all but the worst of days. I’m not as technical as ham radio operators, but in my opinion, this company makes a superior transformer that far exceeds in performance my commercial 9:1. I’m totally blown away by the performance of this antenna in terms of low noise floor and increased SNR6/6/2023 Update:This is definitely a high quality antenna. It matches the performance of my three loop antennas (MFJ-1886, Wellbrook ALA1530LN NA, MLA-30+ w/1 M loop,) across most shortwave bands, but it is now by best antenna greater than 15 MHz. I’m very surprised in that it has a very low noise floor that is nearly identical to my Wellbrook. It is mounted in a Sloper configuration with its high end at 31’, and the feed point is 8’ high. There is 40’ of counterpoise on the ground, and the 40’ coax lead is terminated to a gas discharge tube surge suppressor on an outdoor ground rod that is bonded to the inside house ground. I’m exclusively a shortwave listener living in the Northeast, and regularly receive radio stations such as RNZI from as much as 9,000 miles away. So I would highly recommend this antenna.There was a slight snag that I had corrected: the ferrite core had dislodged from the glue, causing tge core to rattle around in the enclosure, but I used my glue gun to hold it securely in place. Also, no instructions were in the box. This was also not a problem, because instructions are displayed in a pdf file on the manufacturer’s website. Incidentally, the inside connections were solid and professional.

Set this up in a downward sloper configuration from my attic roof-peak down to my fence at the corner of my yard, and I'm getting SWR meter readings under 2.0 on 10, 20, 40 and even 80 meters using my IC-705. When I talk to other HAMs that are 800 to 1,000 miles away and I tell them I'm only pushing about 30 watts with my QRP radio and a cheap linear amp, they can hardly believe it. This simple antenna is fantastic. Couldn't be happier.

Great antenna easy to put up and take down making it my go to rig for the road

Balun was not glued to case. It rattled around. Nothing a bit of super glue couldn't fix.

After getting my General class license last summer, I got a 20/40m dipole and made a 20M dipole with hamsticks to work with my mobile radio used as a base station. While they worked ok, I was limited to those two bands.Due to living in a restrictive HOA community, I couldn't use a large or high antenna, so when I stumbled across the EMCOMM II, I had high hopes.I was not disappointed in the performance of the antenna, and have worked all of the ham bands covered by the antenna (except 6m) on SSB with the antenna running as a sloped horizontal V out of a 2nd story window, to keep it in my yard. I've received 59 reports and have talked all across the US, even reaching far Northeastern Canada, Venezuela (10m), and Japan (17m). With an LDG antenna tuner, my SWR is almost always under 2, and frequently closer to 1.1. I do operate it with a counterpoise. I've only made one NVIS connection at 600miles on 40m in poor ionosphere conditions, but haven't had a good layout to test it, due to my yard space limitations.It's not a massive beam or Yagi, but it's well built, and for 100W barefoot, and flexible configuration that it allows, I've been very pleased.

I can't remember the last time I saw a product built with so much attention to detail and quality. These guys absolutly got it right. If you appreciate quality you may want to check out all the products these guys build.

We tried it on one of our fleet of 30 foot tower generator trailers. Now we have them on several trailers.

Received this antenna with rattling in the connecting box. Opened it and a screw was loose and ground wire from Connector loose inside. Another screw securing the two inductors was loose, not making contact. There was zero loctite or other means of preventing those screws coming loose. The design and execution is poor. The two aluminum tubes for the inductors will never make good contact the the conductors attached to them this way.