Dave,
I'm afraid I can't help much with the length either as I haven't put the antenna
in our our Europa yet ( I should be filling right now!) and anyway I ignored
the Europa design (not that there is anything wrong with it) and made an aerial
of my own design for fun -it came out well, but won't help in sizing your
antenna.
I agree with Jim, the length quoted sounds a bit short- I would have expected
about
55cm per leg, less a bit for the dielectric effects of mounting it on
fibreglass.
So maybe the final length in the book is about right, but I would be
inclined to start a bit longer and cut to size.
The suggestion of drawing a graph is a good one to allow you to visualise where
you are starting from.
One piece of reassurance- you can mess with the length all you like and it is
very
hard indeed to damage anything (a bit like fibreglass you can stick another
bit on and have second crack at cutting it to size!) and, although it is nice
to get it just so, small errors in the end result are likely to be unnoticeable
in practice.
PS Hi Jim, we met in NZ but I didn't realise you were a Ham too- small world!
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