"jim rozen" wrote in message
...
In article , Ed Huntress says...

That's true, but it doesn't address the same issue. The point was that
there's no inherent signal strength advantage in having a vertical or a
horizontal antenna (in terms of polarization) for HF, short-wave
reception,
nor for BCB at night.

I think we're saying the same thing here. He should go with the
kind of antenna that fits his need for stealth, be it vertical,
horizontal, or loop.

Exactly. They'll have different gains and different angles of reception,
which will produce different levels of performance, but polarization is not
a factor when you're dealing with sky waves.

The primary goals should be to get some wire out in the clear and get it
away from sources of electrical noise. If you have a lot of noise, making
the wire longer should help, up to a point.


BTW, I found my old antenna handbook, and a bit about why longer antennas
typically pick up more signal than resonant antennas.

Heh. Somebody had a birthday recently, and netted a copy of "The Antenna
Book" by the ARRL. This may be the same book you are referring to.
It's great.

Mine is the 1968 edition. BTW, our recent discussion got me interested in
getting my license again, so I went out last week and took the Tech and
General class tests. I got my General-class call today but it's a 2-over-3:
KC2NZT. I'll go after the Extra and see if I can get a shorter call.

Also BTW, an antenna that a friend and I shared in college, which we used
for both transmitting and receiving, was a twin-lead vertical combined with
the TV antenna mast, for a three-wire vertical in total. We ran the
twin-lead up but didn't connect it to the TV antenna terminals. Instead, we
soldered the two wires together about a foot below the TV antenna, and then
soldered them to the mast. We soldered all three together again at the
bottom of the mast. Maybe we got some top-hat capacitance out of the TV
antenna. g

Anyway, it worked pretty well. We had a commercial antenna tuner (Drake? I
forget), and we could load it on just about any band and get out fairly
effectively, of course better on some bands than others.

It was like Gunner's situation: almost any TV antenna was acceptable there,
but nothing else was.

--
Ed Huntress