Re: What Antenna for Short Wave
- From: "Arfa Daily" <arfa.daily@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 31 Jan 2009 14:15:49 -0000
<letterman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:bpd7o4htgpa9f70iv4o1tq0cgnn4jhj2jm@xxxxxxxxxx
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:46:26 -0500, tnom@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:25:46 -0600, letterman@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I just bought a portable AM-FM-SW radio. It picks up pretty well on
all bands, but I live in a metal house and know I am losing signal
because of it. In fact I took the radio outdoors and got much better
reception. The radio just has a single telescoping antenna that comes
up to about 30 inches. I want to add an outdoor antenna for the
shortwave. I was told that any piece of wire strung from the house to
a pole would help. I can only clip it onto the telescoping antenna
since there is no antenna connector on the radio, so I'd just use an
alligator clip. My question is what the ideal length of the wire
should be, or don't it matter? OR maybe it should be as long as I can
make it? Also, does height matter? Or does the location matter, such
as going east, north, or .....
Please advise me.
Thanks
LM
A Short Wave antenna that is longer, higher and more clear of any
obstructions such as the side of your house will work best.
It has been my experience that you do not need to actually go to these
extreme lengths to get more than enough signal pickup. For a simple
effective not to ugly omni-directional outdoor Short Wave antenna all
you have to do is make a helical vertical antenna and mount it on the
roof. Just take any plastic or non conductive form like a 2" - 4" PVC
pipe and wind wire helically, similar to the threads on a bolt. As
little as a three foot plastic pipe with only 15 foot of wire will
work great.
I like this idea. As Bill said, avoid electric fences. My whole farm
has them, and they are all the way around the house, with the closest
being 15 feet in the rear, and the furthest being over 100ft in front.
I'd have to run this wire out the rear because there is my drive in
front and with combines and large farm equipment going down there, it
would need to be really high. In the rear I'd be going over the elec
fences. This pvc idea is probably the best because I can mount it to
the mast on my tv antenna with spacers. I can run the wire inside in
the same place as the tv coax. plus it would be well above my electric
fences. Thanks to all the who replied.
LM
It's worth a try for sure, but depending on the frequencies of interest, you
might find that the performance is sometimes not as good as you might
expect, due to the fact that this type of antenna will have a fundamentally
vertical response pattern. This is great for say CB transmissions which are
normally vertically polarised from both base stations and mobiles, but not
so great for ham transmissions in similar bands, which are more likely to be
(at least initially) horizontally polarised as horizontal wire antennas or
horizontal beams are often what are used for transmitting on. A 'sloper' is
often a good compromise, as it has a roughly equal response to both
vertically and horizontally polarized signals. The best suggestion really,
is to just arm yourself with a roll of wire and a few long bamboo poles,
pick a nice warm Saturday when you've got nothing else to do, and have a
little experiment. If you had a sloper passing over the top of your rear
electric fence, provided that it was ten feet or so above the 'active'
strand, you might be surprised at how little interference it actually
caused.
Arfa
.
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