I won't go into detail but the broomstick (or any helicaly wound antenna)
gives up performance for size. The straiter the wire, the better off you
are. If you have the space, just stretch it out strait.


"Dave" wrote in message
...
I just got through picking up a ton of discontinued wire from my local
Home
Depot, and was planning on building a "broomstick" antenna like some I
found
described on the net. Got a question though: doesn't "stretching out" the
coil to a meter or more reduce the inductance of the resulting coil? Why
wouldn't it work better to just leave it on the spool? I was under the
impression that the formula for calculating the inductance for a given
coil
involved multiplying the square of the number of coils by the ratio of the
coil width to length. Wouldn't this mean that a "longer" coil would have
a
lower inductance than a "shorter" coil, given the same length of wire and
approximate diameter of coils?

Forgive me if I'm being stupid here, it has been twenty years since I have
attempted anything like this, but that was what I thought.

The main account I am thinking of was related by someone in Saudi Arabia
who
wrapped 1.2 kM of wire around a piece of PVC and vastly improved their
reception of WWV in the states. I was going to do something similar, and
then looked at the two spools of wire that I was about to unwrap. They
are
already coils, so shouldn't I be able to just hook them up to an aligator
clip and stick this to my whip antenna? (I am now thinking about taking
the
wire off of the smaller spool and adding it to the larger. Shouldn't that
work?) And if I leave the wire on the spools (which are plastic) couldn't
I
turn them toward or away from the station of interest to further improve
reception? (I could even put this in my attic, gaining a few feet of
elevation and hiding it from my unappreciative wife.)

Any input on any part of this idea is more than welcome. I would greaty
value the opinions of those who have actually done something like one of
these two options.

Thanks,

Dave