Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020
I was copying the mail while working in Studio C over the weekend, and heard something that made me pause to listen closer.
Two hams were in conversation about antennas and their radios. One ham had two antennas, an inverted vee and also an end-fed longwire. The other guy praised the man’s longwire antenna as being the bee’s knees; having run a longwire myself, I tend to remember the tendency of end-fed wires to fill your home full of stray RF.
At the time, I was running my Hallicrafters SR-150 with a “Buchanan Hammer” — an EV-664 — as the mic. And running the long wire was a hazardous proposition with the EV-664; the whole mic began quite hot with RF with every transmission, giving me a repeated hot lip, several times I drew an electrical RF arc from the mic to my lips. Ouch!
Anyway, this ham was marveling over the longwire antenna; he even went on to say how he could hear the difference in the audio quality of his signal when he was on the longwire vs. the inverted vee. The guy asked him if the signal was stronger; no, its about the same, only that the fidelity of his signal was much improved on the longwire.
Really? This guy said he could hear a change in the audio fidelity of his buddy’s transmit audio simply because of the antenna? That’s the craziest assertion I’ve heard on ham radio in quite a while. Now if it was a big change in signal strength, I can believe that the quality of the stronger signal would sound better, but that wasn’t the case here — the guy said the fidelity was better with one antenna over the other without a significant change in signal strength.
I tend to rank this statement right up there with CB’ers-turned-ham who pronounce the acronym “SWR” as “sweres”, or the ones who, rather than throw their callsign out in a roundtable discussion, simply say “QSK”. Q-signals aren’t for phone, roger on that, 10-4 good buddy!
At the age of 11, I started on CB radio myself; but I wanted to learn, and I fell in with some excellent mentors and I learned about SWR and how to use an SWR meter (at least I learned that you don’t pronounce SWR! hi hi!).
BAND BROKEN – THE SEQUEL. I was up in the Studio C working on the packing stuff to ship while waiting on the CW traffic net and I was tuning the 75 meter band listening for the usual suspects, and quickly determined the band was (again) running very long. But I’m nothing if not persistent; I went ahead and decided to listen for the traffic net NCS.
At first, his signal was barely audible. He called QNI several times, and one of the net regulars checked in. After hearing no other takes, I checked in, not sure he could copy. But apparently the skip was in our favor, and I got checked in. By the end of the net, the signals were back to fairly normal levels.