My version of the TinyGawant antenna

I learned about the TinyGawant antenna on the SOTA Reflector, in a discussion about antennas for the QMX QRP transceiver. 

Read more about the origin of this antenna in this pdf document.

It uses the same principle as a "Fuchs antenna", but the resonant half-wave radiator is replaced by ... a short whip of only 1.2m! One can not expect a big performance of such a small antenna, but my curiosity made me look for some parts in my junkbox and build one anyway ... it never hurts to try, right?

N6ARA makes available a kit with a 3D-printed box (see here), but shipping it to Europe would be very expensive. Luckily, there is  a nice construction manual here , it has all the info you need.

I made a box out of pieces of PCB, and after measuring, drilling, filing ... the PCB parts were ready:

I provide a banana jack (red) near the whip, to connect a longer wire for experiments, and also a ground jack (black) for a counterpoise.

 After mounting most of the components, this was the intermediate result ...

The final stage was soldering it all toghether, mounting the T50-6 coil, and the resistive SWR bridge.

A back cover was made from clear plexiglass, since people will ask me over and over again "can you open the box to see what's inside? Nooooo, just look through the window! ;-)

My polyvaricon has a maximum capacity of 285 pF, so the high and low ranges would overlap. 
I increased the total number of turns to 28, keeping the tap at 12 turns.

This gives a tuning range from 60m up to 10m, in two ranges. The 20m band can be tuned in the LOW and in the HIGH range.

I first did a test as a receive antenna on a Kenwood THF7E, and must say it is a nice small receive antenna. The tuned network acts as a bandpass filter in front of the receiver, which will never hurt.
Switching in the tuning network gives a 6 dB attenuation, which is useful on the low bands (60/40m) in the evening.

But then I wanted to see if you can use this antenna to transmit ...

I set up the TinyGawant on a small magmount on a baking plate, and used the IC-705 at 5W to do some test transmissions for RBN.
I could tune the SWR to 1.0 on all bands except 15m, where I couldn't get it below 1.5
I sent a message (TEST RBN DE ON7DQ ON7DQ TEST RBN) 5 times on each band from 60m to 10m.

Maybe propagation was bad at the time of the tests (May 7th, 2026), but the only band where I got some spots was 20m, see screenshot below.

All other bands were ... well, just nothing !

Peter, HB9EBE reported a bit better results on the SOTA Reflector.

Maybe the fact that my small garden is surrounded by walls on all sides is a factor, and I should try it another day, and in the open ... to be continued.

Conclusion : yes it's small and handy, it's quite good for receive, but it will probably not save your SOTA or POTA activation if you forget your "big" antenna ...

Happy tinkering !

Luc, ON7DQ