Battle of the Baluns 2

I really wanted to do a repeat test of the Battle of the Baluns to see if the test results were the same. This would add validity to the Voltage Transformer being the better build design. However, the results were quite different.

Check out this post for the original testing walkthrough and initial results.

Testing Round 2

I setup the test exactly the same way I did the first one. It wasn’t in the exact same location but it was very close, just a little further west and smidgeon south. Thankfully Neil, N5EIL in Montana was available for another volley of tests on JS8Call. I ran the same 10 Watts but this time Neil only ran 1 Watt.

Testing Data

• The Voltage Balun was A

• The Current Choke was B

Curiously, the results from Test 3 are the exact inverse of Test 2 … which is rather, odd.

In Test 4, the voltage balun comes out on top again as per Test 1 and 2, but not by the same enormous margin. It was a much tighter race in Test 4.

For Test 5, Neil switched to a Magloop antenna just to see if there was much difference. The results were a stalemate for the dipoles but the Magloop was far worse for NVIS receive. That was an interesting discovery. Also for kicks I broke into a ragchew with some Hams in Montana. I was running 10 Watts SSB and asked for a comparison between transmissions. The current balun got 57 while the voltage balun got 55. It’s another little hat tip to the current choke. SSB is far more subjective though than having the actual digital SNR reports.

Results So Far

For the standard testing:

Voltage Balun: 75%

Current Choke: 25%

In the more subjective testing, the current choke was better.

More testing to come!

73 de VE5REV