On 6/5/2013 12:55 PM, Larry Loen wrote:
Well, once you "hit the wall" at maybe 150 countries or so, (or don't get
the contest scores you want), you start to raise your standards. That
inevitably increases your contact with theory and overrules past practice.
"Not working" is always relative, it seems.
Working good or poor has always been relative. We had a thunder storm
building so I grounded the antenna input to the copper water pipes in
the heating system. Station as in the basement and the pipes were a
short reach. I was still hearing signals on 20. Worked a station out
in the mid Pacific on 20 with a 100 watts from my HT37.
This would have been in 61.
For instance, I once put up a basic Butternut 5 band vertical with a
whopping four buried radials. It actually worked "well enough" on
40/20/15/10 to get me to maybe 200 countries. I even worked South Sandwich
on 40 meters with that setup.
But, my results on 80 were really terrible and remained that way until I
put down the 64 radials recommended in "Low Band DXing", which I hadn't
done. Suddenly, I was doing stuff on 80 that I never did before. I was
able to achieve more on 40, too, when I did what, you know, theory demanded.
It's amazing how suddenly our great performing antenna suddeny doesn't
look as good as it did before the improvements.
I think most of us have a similar learning curve, except maybe we forget
what we learned and why; once learned, you tend to "just do it" in your
future endeavors.
It works the other direction, too. Now that I have that tower at 65 feet,
the results I'm having there throws a retroactive light on what I used to
be able to do and would color my efforts were I to decide to rely on wire
antennas again.
There are those who have worked WAS and DXCC on a simple antenna from an
apartment, but that is a combination of skill and luck.
Of course once you've had the big antennas and a few towers while
running QRO and have to go back to a wire antenna driven bry a
transceiver through a tuner it can be quite a let down.
As you get older and can no longer do your own antenna work, simpler
does gain some strong positives.
73
Roger (K8RI)
Larry Wo0Z
On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 7:50 AM, GEO Badger <w3ab@yahoo.com> wrote:
As pointed out by others here, we put up many antennas and used cheap, err
inexpensive, gear and made lots of contacts and we didn't know our set-ups
wouldn't work. Now we know they won't work.
Why?
---
Ciao baby, catch you on the flip side.
GEO
http://www.w3ab.org
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this
line." - Oscar Levant
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