I recently got a TGM MQ26 antenna, and I thought I'd share some
impressions with the group.

Price-wise, it compares to the rest of the reduced size beams. It's
about $410 delivered in the US (the antenna is made in, and shipped
from, Canada, UPS ground to California came to about $40, and there
was a customs brokerage fee, which is included in the $410 figure).

The packaging was excellent, every element was well padded with
newspaper, and the whole mess inside a stiff cardboard box about 5
feet long.

The instructions are clear and the drawings helpful. Note that while
the parts list indicates a "hardware bag", there is no such thing,
because a fair amount of the assembly steps are already performed,
so all the screws, washers, and nuts are already in place. You do have
to remove some of them for the final assembly, of course.

The most tedious part was the attaching of the spokes to the loading
coils. 20 and 17 meters have a total of six spokes per coil, then 15,
12 and 10 meters have four each. That's 24 spokes per coil, and there
are four of them. It's not hard work, just repetitive.

You can adjust the resonating point by changing the length of one of
the spokes (which you do by loosening and tightening a set screw). As
shipped, the antenna is set to resonate in the middle of the SSB
sub-bands. For example, 20m is set to resonate at 14.250.

Once I had the whole thing put together, it was time to go up on the
roof. Until now, I've had a Cushcraft MA5V, which was usable, but the
QRM level was pathetic (S9 in some portions of 20m for example). I
simply removed the vertical, and slipped the MQ26 in place, leaving it
fixed pointing to South America (I'm about 80 miles south of San
Francisco).

Back to the shack to check VSWR... they matched very closely what's
on the graphs that come in the instruction manual.

How is the performance? Well, this is difficult to quantify. Sometimes
you can work the whole universe with a toothpick, sometimes you can't
talk to the guy down the street with a stack of monobanders and a
kilowatt. But the QRM is down immensely, and I can hear a lot more stuff
than before with the vertical.

So far, I've worked a few South American stations, and even a handful
of east coast stations, and one European, despite the fact that the
antenna is not pointing in that direction. I also heard several
stations in Oregon and Washington coming in very strong, at least one
of them had its antenna pointing diectly towards me.

Overall, I'm pleased with the product. Construction quality is good,
and not hard to install even working by yourself. I guesstimate a
total of about four hours from when I started to open the box to when
I walked into the shack to check the antenna out. As far as beams go,
this one is fairly unobtrusive. Not invisible, but not too much of an
eyesore either.

The next project is to get a rotor in place...

73,

-jav w6vms