This enlightening response is forwarded with permission.
Tom N4KG
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "John & Margaret Weatherley" <teamw@quixnet.net>
To: <n4kg@juno.com>
To: <towertalk@contesting.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 08:49:00 -0500
Subject: Eu antennas
>I have never understood how so many 100W Europeans can be
40 to 60 dB below guys with 100W and tribanders. I can only
envision paths obscured by mountains or antennas nearly on the
ground. The QRP'ers with decent antennas blow right through
the 100W guys with lousy antennas / locations.<
Hi Tom : Your observations are correct but you would need to
take a trip to Eu and take a look at the handicaps some of those
guys have to endure to fully understand the situation.
I have a friend in the UK who is retired and on social security with
an old FT101. He lives in a typical terraced house built in the
industrial
revolution era in the late 1800's. It is owned by the city council like a
fairly high proportion of homes in Eu and he rents it and has done for
over 25 years. (Rightly or wrongly, he chose this route on the premise
that the city does all the repairs and redecorates the house every couple
of years and there are no property taxes)
His front and back yards are approx. 12 x 12 ft each. His XYL
maintains these as neat little flower patches. In the past he has
struggled along with "invisible" antennas across the street to the
gutter of another house usually made of 22 awg enamelled copper
wire end fed with virtually no reasonable RF ground or counterpoise.
He has a attic which is 12 x 10 by less than10ft tall. Using Elnec I put
together a squashed mini quad design for 15m with inductive loading
which would fit the space and would (due to pure luck) fire to the west.
I sent the design and an old Heathkit GDO to him and he put it together
and now I can enjoy a QSO with him fairly regularly. Previously he was
usually audible but unreadable.
I have two other friends with slightly larger yards who both use G5RV's
usually about 25 ft high tailored to fit into their available space.
These
stations are only readable on very rare occasions and dialogue with
them is usually restricted to e-mail.
I have other fiends in Eu who have similar power but are able to put up
small beams such as MA5's, MiniQuads and in one case a used TA32.
These guys are head and shoulders over the others as you correctly
observed.
There are tens of thousands of hams with similar space / economic
situations in Eu and other parts of the world and probably in the inner
suburbs of many US older cities. There must be a really fertile field
out there for some of the smart guys to concentrate some of their
expertise in developing small antennas to improve this market.
A technological challenge indeed.
Best 73, John AB4ET
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