November 16, 2025
I rent a house with a very small yard, littered with small trees, in an HOA, and I have a three year old. My antenna options are limited, so I built something compact. My design is based off of the Rybakov design in Salty Walt’s Portable Antenna Sketchbook, and I realized I could make it an inverted L using conduit after a conversation with Something Awful Forums user Jonny 290.
The Rybakov is a 25 foot non-resonant end-fed vertical antenna with a 4:1 un-un. It’s very forgiving to imprecise measurements. However, it’s a compromise antenna. In my suburban neighborhood north of Seattle, I often get S7 background noise. It’s not great for SSB contacts, but I can hit Hawaii, Alaska, Japan, Russia, and South America on FT8.
This is the article I wish I’d had when I was trying to figure out a small antenna I could adapt to my yard, with detailed instructions and results.
It’s made from a 10 foot length of half inch EMT conduit attached to my back fence, with a 15’ length of 18ga wire on the end running up to the top of a nearby tree. To get it up there, I threw a length of arborist’s string over a high branch. There are two 25’ “radials” made of the same 18ga wire running in either direction along the fence line. The un-un is tucked away inside a weatherproof enclosure screwed to the fence.
Here’s a diagram.
Links are provided for reference