The Situation

I live in an apartment above a business in the Downtown District. When I first got into Amateur Radio, I was limited in how I could mount antennas. I didn’t have access to the roof or a balcony. So all of my antennas had to be indoors. Thankfully, my landlord didn’t have issues with me mounting the antennas to the ceiling (although I will have to use some hole sealer for where the planter hooks were mounted). Thus, I came up with the Slinky Dipole for an antenna.

Researching indoor antennas, I came across an article in an old QST magazine about the “Slinky Dipole.” The author used two slinkies attached around the top of the wall at a 90-degree angle to achieve their goal. I was in a position where I could either try that or I could stretch them out in a straight line across the middle of the room. The room is 20’x15′, so I had plenty of room on the ceiling.

The Plan

I planned to use wooden dowels to hold the slinkies and a ladder line for the connections to my coax. On the far end of the slinkies, I attached wires that hung down, so I could *try* to get on 80m. I say *try* because it was hit or miss. I could hook those wires to various points along the slinky to “tune” the antenna to different bands. With a decent tuner, I could use 80m, but not very well. The ladder line terminated in a balun (LDG 4:1 Balun), which had a piece of coax running down to the radio.

I used this antenna for about two years. On SSB, I was able to reach around the Midwest and Eastern United States. On FT8 and WSPR, I was able to reach around the world. Not bad for about $30,00 worth of materials. In the interest of experimentation, I switched the slinky dipole out for a homemade folded dipole. Believe it or not, the slinky did better. And with the way my town is set up, I was mainly facing East-West on the broadside of the antenna.

So, if you are thinking about how you can run an antenna inside an attic, this might be a viable alternative. Especially if you have plenty of room. If I could have stretched the slinkies out further, I would have been able to get on 80m and maybe even 160m, although that would have been rough.