The DX Commander comes with 100m of very good wire, which is enough for making the 4 element (40,30,20,17m) vertical and some for radials. Having already bought 50 meters of wire for 80m I was still down on the count for both radials and the ‘all band’ – having complete the ‘all-band’ construction it was now time to sort the radials !
With the orignial wire and radials I had around 28-30 radials, which whilst much better than only 1 and improvement on 15, is still slighty short for 80m and also more radials=higher Db out at other wave lengths.
So what is the science about radials ? The Calum has a good video to help, and the references are very good, so I’ll put that here first.
So basically adding radials helps (I did try to find a video of a person fallilng off a boat getting onto a pier, but was getting to distracted…) I took 50 meters of wire (the same type I had use on the verticals) and set about making into 3.5 meter lengths, which some great help from my son Paul which saved my back alot in terms of getting up and measuring and cutting !
pull and cut thanks Paul 🙂 
it started as 50m, it became radials
With the cutting done, it was time to return indoors for strip, crimp and solder !
new crimper doing a grand job 
solder together, solder the crimp
I then returned outdoors to install the addtional elements. I doubled up on one existing element, but had a pretty decent fan of 3.5m wire elements going on now.
a nice spread 
view from the base 
keeping it tidy 
gaps to fill 
now with added elements
I’d need to an exact recount (will do so later) but I think I now have enough radials to accomodate the 80m vertical.
With having added the radials it was time to test ! For this I use FT8 as it has a great map and includes a signal report when a QSO is complete.
I was now reaching Kuwait on 17M and even better was that I could see the call sign in my WSJTX screen – i had to give it a try ! And sure enough within a few minutes (this guy was was getting alot of QSO’s in) I had made contact !
So i think i could continue to add more radials, but for now I’m happy with how the DX Commander is performing and the radials are performing their function. I will investigate more ‘science’ based ways of radial performance, but his helps for now !