My birthday present of this year was getting a bit dusty. So after a days work this afternoon I decide to put it in the air for a test run. A few days ago I bought some nice mast pieces of 1m20 each. So I attached the BuddiPole to one of the mast pieces and build 6 of the pieces (the BuddiPole itself around 16 meters up in the air). It was kind of scary standing on the roof, holding the growing mast with two hands in the (little) wind. But it worked! I attached the temporary mast to my other 2m/70cm mast with some tie-wraps. There was virtually no wind, so not much could go wrong.
Back in the shack I did immediately notice the low noise level and strong signals. Of course it’s high altitude is also responsible for that (less QRM) but the SWR is flat on all of the 15 meter band! Thus it’s design and construction is quite nice. In less then an hour I worked 5 new DXCC-entities (countries) on 15 meter: Bahrain, China, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Cuba!
I think we can safely say the BuddiPole is working nice! Next time I’m putting it up in open field.