The Rybakov Vertical: A 7.62 m Do-Everything Wire
Most of my antenna projects are resonant designs — EFHWs cut to length, trap antennas, delta loops. The Rybakov is the opposite philosophy, and that’s exactly why I like it: a single piece of wire, deliberately non-resonant, that gets you on every HF band from 40 m up with nothing more than a 4:1 unun and a tuner.
The name comes from the Russian rybak — “fisherman” — because the classic build is just a wire taped to a telescopic fishing pole. Cheap, stealthy, and fast to deploy. Perfect for portable work.
Why 7.62 metres?
This is the clever part. A resonant antenna is cut to a specific fraction of a wavelength, which forces its feedpoint impedance to either very high (half-wave) or very low (quarter-wave) values. The Rybakov does the opposite: 7.62 m (25 ft) is chosen precisely because it’s never a clean quarter- or half-wave on any ham band.
If you plot 7.62 m as a fraction of a wavelength across the bands, it always lands somewhere awkward and in-between:
| Band | Length in λ | % of a wavelength |
|---|---|---|
| 40 m | 0.19 λ | 19 % |
| 30 m | 0.25 λ | 25 % |
| 20 m | 0.38 λ | 38 % |
| 17 m | 0.45 λ | 45 % |
| 15 m | 0.51 λ | 51 % |
| 12 m | 0.64 λ | 64 % |
| 10 m | 0.76 λ | 76 % |
(Values are approximate, based on nominal band frequencies.)
Because it’s never resonant, the feedpoint impedance stays in a moderate, well-behaved range everywhere instead of swinging to extremes. That’s what makes it so tuner-friendly across the whole spectrum.
How it works
Three parts:
- The radiator — 7.62 m of wire, run up a fibreglass pole.
- A 4:1 unun at the base, which steps the wire’s high-ish, random impedance down by roughly 4× toward 50 Ω. This keeps the coax run low-loss — you’re not sending a wild mismatch down the feedline.
- A tuner (ATU), which does the final matching to the rig on each band.
So the unun does the heavy lifting and the tuner cleans up the rest. A tuner isn’t optional here — the antenna is designed to never be resonant, so you always tune it.
It’s a UnUn, not a balun
Small but worth getting right: the transformer is a 4:1 UnUn — unbalanced-to-unbalanced. Both the vertical wire and the coax are unbalanced, so there’s no balanced side to convert. You’ll occasionally see it called a “4:1 voltage balun,” but functionally it’s an unun. I wind mine on a T200-2 (red, iron-powder) toroid with around 14–18 bifilar turns, sealed in a UV-resistant enclosure, with a common-mode choke just below it to keep RF off the braid.
Don’t skip the radials
The unun needs something to work against, and this is where a lot of first Rybakov builds disappoint. More ground is more performance.
The setup I run is a 7.62 m radiator with four 3.96 m radials — a manageable, roll-up set that deploys quickly in the field without laying down a full ground-radial farm. As general guidance:
- Fixed station: four or more radials on the ground is a good baseline. More is better.
- Portable (POTA/SOTA): two elevated counterpoise wires are enough to get on the air without laying a full radial field.
How I use it
For me the Rybakov is a grab-and-go antenna. It rolls up small, deploys in a couple of minutes off a squid pole, and covers 40–10 m without swapping anything. It’s not going to beat a resonant, full-size antenna on any single band — but as a one-wire, all-band compromise for travel and quick activations, the performance-to-effort ratio is hard to beat, especially on 20 m and up.
If you already own a tuner and can wind a toroid, you can build the whole thing in an afternoon for the price of some wire and a core. Recommended.
73 de DL7EDU / LU5VQV