Choosing antennas for DXpedition is no small task especially when you are a holiday maker. The first thing to consider is the size and the weight of the baggage you can have when going on a trip. In our case we managed to put together a small group of people (5 in total). We were Mike, UN8GC with his wife, Larissa, UN8GCL , Andy, UN8GU with his wife, Alexandra, and Mike & Larissa's old friend,  Andrey. So potentially we could carry up to 100 kg of baggage of which about 30-40% could be clothing items and other personal things and the rest could be our Ham radio gear.

Considering propagation conditions was the second thing we had to do. Overall we are at the bottom of the solar activity cycle so the propagation on high bands is poor. We chose to focus on working on 7, 10, 14, 18 and 21 MHz bands. We also wanted to operate on 1.8 MHz and 3.5 MHz bands.

The easiest to assemble, light weight while well performing antenna seemed to be vertical multiband GP. Considering unknown ground conditions and inability to carry professionally manufactured and often heavy vertical antennas we thought we could put together ourselves.

The basic design was very simple - we took sections on square aluminum tubing of 25 by 25mm each 1.5 m long with connecting stubs and put together 2  7.5 m high vertical antennas. In order to hold the base of the antenna we took a stub of 1 m 23 mm aluminum tube which we mounted on a 150 by 500 mm textolite (cloth laminate), which is  so common for electrical use as isolator back home. The idea was to have the 1 m 23mm AL tube stick into the ground. On it would rest the main antenna structure. To make vertical multiband we thought it's best to employ semi or fully automatic antenna tuners manufactured by LDG Electronics Company.

Mike, UN8GC has already had experience with LDG Z-100 semi-automatic antenna tuner while he was on vacation to Issyk-Kul Lake, Kyrgyzstan and operated from their with his Kyrgyz call sign EX7MW. The tuner showed excellent ability to tune random-length antennas and provided excellent results.   Since we needed 2 antennas, we had to get another tuner. Vladimir, UP0EPC has kindly provided us with his LDG AT-100Pro which was fully automatic tuner capable of easily handling 100 W on HF + 50 MHz. Thus we managed to build 2 identical vertical antennas. Of course, being in tropics we expected to get some heavy rain showers. To secure our automatic tuners we used regular plastic bags which we put on them. We appreciated this simple solution at one time when we got hit by a soaking rain.

Since we were primarily focused in our operation on 7 and 10 MHz bands we thought it would make sense to add some capacity loads to the antenna thus improving overall antenna current distribution and antenna's efficiency. That's why we added 4 by 4 m copper wires on the top of each 7.5 m vertical section. They not only served as capacity loads but also helped us to guy-wire the antennas eliminating the need for additional layers of guy-wires.

As for guy wires, we thought that using regular 3 mm polyamide rope would do well. Polyamide rope is very strong and UV resistant. It can handle very significant loads so your antenna is perfectly secure when guyed with this type of rope. We cut 4 10 m pieces of polyamide rope for each antenna. Guy wires were attached to 10 cm long loop head type screws which were screwed right into the ground.

To ensure efficient setup we connected antenna tuners through double-wire cords to inbuilt transceiver 13 V power supply provided through the external tuner connection outlet.

So far we can say that despite close vicinity to each other both antennas have shown outstanding performance on bands 7-18 MHz. We have not yet caught reasonable propagation on 21 MHz to test our antennas performance.