Wire antennas

Wire antennas are the workhorses of the HF bands: cheap, effective, and easy to put up.

The dipole family

The half-wave dipole is the reference. Droop its ends from a single support and you get an inverted-V that needs only one mast. Feed a half-wave at its end through a transformer and you have an end-fed half-wave, easy to deploy as a sloper or along a fence.

Going multiband

A single resonant dipole works one band. Designs like the G5RV use a matching section so one wire loads on several bands — trading peak performance for convenience.

Strengths and limits

Wire antennas are broadly omnidirectional, quiet to build, and forgiving. Their main limit is size on the lowest bands and modest gain — but for general HF operating they are hard to beat.