Roy,

Thanks for the update. I just read those postings. That V antennas looks
similiar to what I have, except I feed at the end of my wire. Also, my wire
isn't terminated and is not grounded. (Whenever I ground my wire, I get a
severe loss of signal...?)

Anyway, after seeing the price of their antenna, I quickly decided that mine
isn't so bad after all...

A couple of quick questions:

1. It sounds like, at least for my suburb environment, I'm probably not
going to improve my reception by having a yagi antenna. So, as you said,
it's better to reduce the noise coming into the receiver. I get a lot of
QRM from non-atmospheric noise... although it seems like recently, the
atmospheric noise has been really bad. (Even WWV doesn't come in without
extra noise.)

2. I've never measured the SWR of my antenna. Will this have any affect on
my signal reception? I was under the impression that SWR was really only
valid if you're transmitting energy..?

3. Really dumb question here. If a branch from a tree is touching my wire,
then is my antenna effectively cut in length... from that point to my
feedpoint? My construction of the antenna was done rather quickly, so if
this is the case, then I'll need to relocate the wire.

(FYI, currently, I have rougly a 100ft length of wire, which actually is in
a V-shape... almost the shape of the house. The wire itself is a good 30ft
off the ground... which should be 'above' the QRM levels of the surrounding
houses. My endpoint is a simple balun which converts the wire Z to 50ohms
.... and then I use low-loss coax to my rig.)

I'm just looking to 'improve' my design if that's possible... and definitely
increase my S/N ratio as you suggested.


Thanks for your time.
-Nick

"Roy Lewallen" wrote in message
...
The gain (that is, the strength of a signal sent or received in a given
direction compared to a reference antenna) is the same for transmitting
and receiving. However, gain is often the least important criterion for
a receiving antenna. The reasons why are summarized in a posting I made
just a few days ago. Go to http://www.groups.google.com, choose
"Advanced search", and locate the posting I made on Sept. 20 on this
newgroup, on the thread "Ten-tec vee beam". I and others have also made
similar postings in the past on the topic, which you should be able to
locate by searching for a few key words or phrases such as "receiving
antennas".

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Nick C wrote:
Sorry for the dumb question, but the ARRL antenna books just confuse me
sometimes. I seem to get more questions than I get answers to.

Question: In an HF beam antenna, such as a Yagi... the forward gain
measurement... is this in terms of the output gain (ERP) or does this
also
mean the receiving gain as well?

The reason why I'm asking: I'm trying to come up with the ideal SWL
antenna. I currently have a 75ft wire antenna using the RS kit. This
does
a pretty good job of pulling in signals. I'm just wondering if there's
a
better option.... such as a multi-band HF beam antenna..?
So what antenna would give me the best "gain" in terms of receiving
power.
I'm doing no transmitting here...


Thanks