A friend of mine, Jim Sammons KA1ZOU and I had an article published in the May 2025 QST (pp 58-60). Our club, Newport County Radio Club, with about 150 members, had a fair number interested in Parks on the Air activations. There were almost as many different antenna configurations used as there were people. We decided to get together and have an “Antenna Shootout” to see if we could understand which antennas worked the best.
I will leave folks to read the article (linked above) for the details, but we setup multiple stations, each running 100 watts and sending identical test messages out at the same time. The Reverse Beacon Network gathered information on the spots received, including distance and signal strength, which became the basis of determining the “winner”. Of course that term is somewhat subjective, as one might be more concerned with the signal strength, or perhaps the ease at which the antenna is set up.
Being lazy, I was more interested in a reasonable performance but minimal effort, and my simple mag-mount Hamstick came in third place. The best performing antenna was a full 1/4 wave whip on 20-meters (17′ feet), which is what I have been using ever since.
