The other week, the EMDRC club had a presentation on portable and lite HF antennas as well as some other ideas on portable operation. Len Steel vk3fb showed a nifty and cheap way of making some wire winders. The video of the presentation can be seen on YouTube at the bottom of this post.

I started my search for some core flute to make up my own winders. Googling found sheets of the material available from bunnings for $4.85. this stuff is 3mm deep, consider it light duty! Len talked about being able to source his from scrap advertising signs he found around his neighbourhood. Since buying a sheet I have come into a big supply of heavier duty stuff, I have enough for many happy winders!

On the VKlogger forum, I was pointed to this UK site that had a pre drawn template for a small winder, and printed off the page to use as a guide.

I glued the paper template to some stronger cardboard and set about tracing the shape onto the core flute before cutting it out!

And the results. Success!! The winders are strong, but very light, with my “”random”” 12.5m length of wire that I use with my Z match antenna tuner the winder and wire comes to just 46 grams. The pair at 91 grams, it makes for a very light antenna!

At the same time,, I created a larger winder shape on some cardboard and then used this to trace onto the core flute for a bigger winder!

Now, my core flute adventures will take over the world!. I made up a small dipole centre,and cut some wire in preparation for a simple 1/4 wave 40m dipole, but my version one centre efforts were pretty ordinary, I have some more ideas and will make up version two shortly, and with the off cuts of the core flute, I’m going to use them as insulators/separators on the linked dipole project that’s under way! that’s going to use the DX Unicorn wire and ill post my efforts for that project when completed.

The project occupied a couple of hours of my time, and I was able to produce something useful! If you are after a simple and light wire winder/holder for your portable antennas. This project is rally worth a try, especially if you get the core flute for free!! Thanks Len for the pointer!