I got my hands on a Chameleon Hybrid-mini since I was having trouble tuning any lower than 40M with their CAUM. I’ve been doing some tests and…
…so far so good!
The Hybrid-mini will easily tune down to 160M with the V2L. I’m not sure how efficient it is on 80M and below, but 40M it works fairly well and as you go up in frequency, it becomes more efficient. It really seems to like 20M-15M.
I’ve done a few tests while camping. I used the Hybrid-mini base clamped onto my mobile mount for a good ground and threw the supplied 60ft wire up in some trees. I made a few contacts here and there. The main goal was camping, not playing radio. I don’t think the wire was set up well. I didn’t put much thought into it. I just threw it up in some trees with the help of a slingshot, fishing line and a lead weight. But with this setup, I made several contacts to the Colorado QSO party to help them out with some contesting, had a nice chat with a guy in Alaska, barely made a contact with Japan and a nice contact with a guy in Oregon doing some portable QRP testing with 1 watt and a 40M dipole for NVIS. That was impressive!
The other test I ran was basically the same as I’ve done before. I clamp the Hybrid-mini + V2L onto a fence. This time, I added a 9.5ft telescopic whip I got from Buddipole to the V2L. Without having more time to test, it seems like it’ll be a great performer. I was able to make contacts easily with good signal reports. Using the fence as a ground is not the best test in the world, so I’m working on repurposing a camera tripod to mount it on and I’ll add 4 30ft wires for a counterpoise.
