I picked up an MC-750 one year ago and it quickly became a primary antenna for me. For those not immediately familiar with it, it’s an SO-239 base which connects to a 5.6m telescopic whip and offers 40m to 6m out of the box, and with the addition of another coil you can add 80m too. There are other similar antennas out there, the closest I’ve seen is probably the MyDEL JPC-12.
It’s not a cheap antenna coming in at around £200/$180 and it’s not the smallest or lightest antenna. If you’re counting grams, I’m sure someone will compare it to something like an end-fed half wave wire thrown into a tree. Yes there are lighter options. However, the current configuration for the MC-750 that I carry, including base, extension pole, whip and tripod is only 1.15Kg. This configuration gives me 14Mhz to 50Mhz and for a couple of hundred extra grams I can add the coils (the 80m coil is 250 grams, for example).
There are many different approaches to antennas and people have very strong opinions, often they’ll talk as if their approach is the only correct approach. For example some people are hardcore “build your own” fanatics whilst other people are very much “anything is an antenna if your tuner is good enough”. Some people will loudly tell you that your chosen approach is wrong. However, something that I really like about the MC-750 is that I can deploy it quickly, extend it to the correct mark for the frequency that I want to operate on, and it just works. I don’t need a tuner at all. Which is a good thing as the three main radios that I operate (The Lab599 TX-500, the ICOM IC-705, and the Yaesu 857D) do not have a tuner and with this antenna I have no purpose for one.
Yes, there are some tiny tuners out there (such as the N7DDC ATU-10 or the Elecraft T1) but, I don’t need one, so it’s one less thing to carry and set up. Speaking of less to carry, the antenna comes in a lovely carry bag, which I dumped immediately. There’s also an optional steel tripod available – but I swapped mine out for a carbon fibre camera tripod which works perfectly well and weighs next to nothing.
You’ll see me carrying the MC-750 in just about every photograph of my portable operations. I strap it to the side of my backpack and I’ve never had a problem with this carrying method. It’s there when I need it and out of the way when I don’t.
I’ve carried this antenna for a full year. I’ve carried it on every SOTA operation and used it on a great many of them – except where I get easy activations using just my handheld. I find it quick to use, easy to use, and very effective. I’ve recommended it to friends and I loved it so much that I bought a spare one.
All of that said, this week I had a failed POTA activation and the first in my (hopefully not to be continued soon) “Parks Off The Air” series thanks to this antenna. We’d been out here for several hours, I was tired and I just wanted to make my contacts and close down the station. Whilst rushing to set up the MC-750 in the dark, I put down the tripod, attached the telescopic whip, grabbed the top of the whip to extend it to the right height…and it came off in my hand. Standing in a pitch black car park, holding the top two segments of the only 40m antenna I had with me, my POTA activation was doomed.
So has this recent experience changed my opinion of the MC-750? Well I carried it without incident for a year, on all kinds of SOTA activations. In the mud and in the wet. I also never really maintained the antenna. I didn’t clean it often, or apply oil, and I wasn’t gentle with it. I just ran it like a workhorse and threw it in the truck when I was done – and it kept up with that for 12 months without complaint.
It turns out, Chelegance offer a spare whip for $36 (and AliExpress has something similar for $12 which looks like it might work). So I bought another whip – and I’m planning to keep carrying this antenna, at least for another 12 months I guess.
