One year we went up to the hills for the VHF contest, and the activity was pretty slow. So I clipped 8 two-foot clip-cords end to end and threw it on top of the canopy we had, and stuck the end into the co-ax connector and
worked a bunch of QSOs on 20 meter CW with about 20 watts! It worked
great.
73,
John K6YK
A few dozen, but I actually made a second mistake on that occasion… I accidentally ran less than one watt. Didn’t matter to KT5X, in New Mexico, who snapped me up and gave me a decent report. That was in a better part of the sunspot cycle.
By strange coincidence I made a video yesterday using an electric fence as an antenna. The video will be published in few days on my Radio Adventures YouTube channel. It worked. I was not in the least shocked.
Hence the electric fence in the photo of your “stinging nettle mishap”!
I presume that your OK now?
I’ve got an electric fence in my field that I’ve been meaning to try tuning up for ages to see what it can do…I just haven’t got round to doing it yet.
However, the weirdest antenna I used was a coax cable lying on the ground.
I wasn’t aware of this and wondered why I had to call several times and use the full 100 W to make the qso with a VK6 portable station. Back home, I recognised the antenna was broken. I obviously tuned nothing but the coax shield and the counterpoise and made several EU contacts and one DX contact with this setup.
This illustrates perfectly how important a good performing antenna is for an activator and how tough life becomes for the chasers when activators use short and coiled whip antennas and the like…
If they even use QRPP, that makes it even tougher…
I absolutely agree, but I’m also wondering how much difference a vertical vs horizontal makes.
Certainly on 40m & below you are generally relying on NVIS propagation (at least here in the UK to reach chasers in Europe), so I’m imagining that a horizontal with a high take off angle will probably perform better then a vertical with a low take off angle.
On the higher bands (I think you said that you did it on 20m), this might not be such a factor. In fact the low angle of a vertical may be preferable on 20m due to the longer skip………in which case your experiment demonstrates the point even more clearly!
I completely agree. A small 1m antenna is never going perform as well as a full size antenna.
Putting aside “polarisation” & the fact that one antenna is a heavy compromise, my point was about the “take-off angle” of a horizontal compared to a vertical.
The take off angle of a vertical isn’t optimal for NVIS contacts. Even a full size vertical antenna could put you an S-point or two down compared to a full size horizontal for local NVIS contacts as a vertical has a null above the antenna. For DX contacts the opposite would likely be true.
I was therefore making the point that you would expect to see a difference between a vertical & horizontal antenna even if one of them wasn’t a compromise…….not enough to account for the difference seen though.
Long story short:- I’ll continue using full size antennas in preference to a shortened “compromise” antennas!
I tried one of those last year! Not for SOTA though. Mine had enough inductance (in the form of 30-something turns on a big ferrite toroid if I remember correctly) to resonate on 80m. I sat it on the metal roof with an alligator clip to the roof for a counterpoise. I was heard by local stations but no real contacts. Until I tried JS8 - it worked! I made a couple of contacts. No DX though.