Hmm. Okay. Only I don't have much outside space available. I *might* be
able to manage 20-30 feet of random wire, but that is about it. And I have
more than a mile of small-guage wire on these two spools. I was planning on
wrapping it around a five-foot long piece of 4 inch PVC and standing it
behind a closet door. Since my last last message I tried a very crude
"hook-up" with one of the spools of wire and got absolutely no improvement
in reception. Now I understand why, thanks to you good people.

Back to the 20-30' piece of random wi my only option is to run it out the
window and along the top rail of the fence in the back yard. Would this
really outdo a massive broomstick antenna?

Thanks for the input. You've all got me thinking.

Dave


"Tony Meloche" wrote in message
...


CW wrote:

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.


Experimentation and experience have taught me that this is
basically correct. "Broomstick" antennas give pretty good performance
in a very compact space - they are even (marginally) "portable". But
for signal-pulling ability, they'll never beat a well-thought-out
longwire or randomwire. If you can tuck a one-meter broomstick into
your car somewhere for traveling, you've got the world
by the butt for shortwave listening away from home. But at home - your
"permanent space" - go with a random or longwire, if you possibly can.

Tony





"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





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