Charlie Wells K4SKI (pronounced kay-forsky)
The 15 Meter "H" Bomb
12 elements, 100' boom, 60' tower, 9' spaced elements, 100' alunimum ladder

My own opinion; this thing must have had a very sharp beam width, unpracticle for most operations. A 5 over 5 probably would have worked better. However, it was quite a conversation piece and made several magazine articles... K8CX

I just ran across your pictures of the twelve element 15m beam at K4SKI back in 1971. Actually, Charlie put that thing up in about 1963. Charlie and I were really good friends back then, and did a lot of DXing together. I noticed the picture is from a 1971 magazine, and there is a rooftop in partial view. When Charlie first put it up, he lived in a mobile home on the outskirts of Greenville, NC. so the antenna must have been relocated at some point. Charlie ran a BC-610 on 15m AM, and we converted the final to run a 304TH instead of the 250TH. We didn't have wattmeters in those days, so I have no idea how much power it would run, but it was a lot! At the time, I had seven elements on 15m, and ran a homebrew pair of 4-400s on AM. As I said, we did a lot of Dxing together, and back in those days there weren't any 2m local repeaters and that sort of thing, so whenever one of us worked a rare station we'd call the other on the phone and let him know. One day I got home from work and my wife met me at the door, saying the old (B&W) TV was broken. I took the back off and saw one of the tuner tubes, a 6U8, wasn't lit. Since I didn't have a spare, and the TV/radio shop was closed for the day, I called Charlie on the phone. I said "Hey Charlie, you got a 6U8?" He quickly answered, "No! What frequency is he on?"!!! I haven't heard from him since I left Greenville in 1966 to work at RTP near Raleigh. I wrote him a couple of times years ago, but I don't think Charlie was much for writing letters. Charlie was the classic old-timer, builder-experimenter, hard-working, stay-up-all-night DXing kind of guy. I'd like to shake his hand and tell him I enjoyed knowing him and being his friend.
Phil Chambley, Sr. k4dpk

Magazine article courtesy of WO4LF
Info courtesy of K4DPK
Second photo from the cover of "THE DXERS MAGAZINE" by Gus Browning W4BPD
Issue 93, November 6, 1968