Can I Use My ZS6BKW on 160 Meters?

I wanted to get on the air for the CQ 160 contest this weekend but my Inverted “L” is down. I have a ZS6BKW that I have used on 80m before and wondered if I could do it on 160 meters. The two legs are around 45 feet each and the ladder line is about 40 feet long. That seems like enough wire to do something on 160 with my tuner.

The only balun handy is a 4:1. I tied the two ends of the ladder line together at the balun and ran a ground wire to a pipe I have in the yard. I did a quick SWR sweep and WOW! Looks like it was custom made for this. Hope I don’t find out that this is not “real.” But here I go. Let’s see how it works.

Antenna Details

This is the same approach that is often used to get on 160 meters with an 80 meter dipole dipole. The basic idea is to connect the two sides of the dipole together, so you can take advantage of the total wire length being double of either side of the dipole. In my case, this looks like a big “T” with each side of the tee connected to 40 feet of ladder line and 45 feet of wire in one leg of the ZS6BKW. The total wire in use is around 170 feet. This is connected to the “+” side of my balun which connects to the center conductor of the coax to the rig. Here is a picture of the balun. This seems like a good reason to keep my baluns reachable from the ground for flexibility in reconfiguring the antenna.

The other side of the balun was connected to a wire, about 30 feet long, terminated at a ground rod in my yard. Actually, at my antenna lightning arrestor block, my coax ground connects to the shield of several other wire antennas. Lets just say that there is a lot of wire on this “ground system.” It would be impossible to make a reasonable model of this antenna.

How Did it Work?

The CQ 160 meter contest is not yet officially over, but the nighttime operating is. I only operate Saturday night for about 6.5 hours. I was able to make 302 QSOs in 49 States/Provinces and 27 DX entities. I did raise my power to about 300 watts to maximize points for PVRC, my contest club. I consider this to be a big success and now I have a quick way to get on 160 meters in a hurry in the future. No doubt that I can thank the many stations that had truly great antenna on 160, for these QSOs.

Update 12-10-25

Just worked the ARRL 160m CW contest with this antenna configuration. It continues to work very well. I only worked one night, about 07:20 and made about 330 contacts. No DX, but I heard others complaining that there was not propagation for DX with the possible exception of 1 or 2 hours over the entire weekend. It seemed like my power was a bit low, and after the contest I determined that I was only running about 80 watts, due to the power cable and fuses I used to feed the DC power to the rig.

I just exchanged email with a Ham in England who wanted to try this approach with his newly installed ZS6BKW. Once he got the configuration right, he reports being able to get on 160m after several years with no 160m capability. That is great to hear. I guess I should model or analyze this antenna to understand why it works so well on this Band. The SWR plot is almost hard to believe.