Ian White GM3SEK wrote in news:bVv
:
Alan Peake wrote:
Dave Oldridge wrote:
Properly designed, they have a good reputation for doing what the
theory says they will do. Just remember, though, that you're going to
have to sewer almost half your transmitted power into the terminating
resistor. But that's the half that would be going the wrong way,
basically.
But it would get there - eventually 
Long or short path. But I don't
know if both paths are ever open at the same time to the same extent.
If not, then it may not be a problem. What about running a transmission
line from where the terminating R would be, back to the feed point?
Assuming you can match it all that is.
No problem. Pipe the signal back from the far end into the shack, feed
it into a circulator, and add it to the outgoing signal. Cecil will
explain what happens to the power :-)
Replying to Yuri's point: from personal experience of using a rhombic
100 wavelengths long for 2m moonbounce, it had only about the same
maximum gain as a box of 4 mid-size yagis - and that is only while the
moon is passing through the very narrow main beam, which only happens
for a magic 20 minutes on certain days of the month.
In other words, the rhombic did work, but the performance was nowhere
near as spectacular as we had expected from its huge electrical length.
What is undeniably true is that it *looked* spectacular! I've used many
kinds of antennas since then, up to an 85ft dish, but not one of them
has given me the same buzz as that rhombic. And there is the trap: buzz
isn't the same thing as performance.
We need to be very careful about applying dual standards. An
unavoidable
feature of all very long rhombics is that the main beam is very narrow,
because the edges of the main lobe are sliced away by large numbers of
sidelobes that are not many dB down. If we saw that kind of E-plane
pattern in a yagi, we wouldn't hesitate to call it a "bad design"... so
what's "good" about the same feature in a rhombic?
Yes, they are much better as HF point-to-point antennas than they are as
general purpose. For that kind of service, you can pick your height and
rhombic size to specifically service the one path.
--
Dave Oldridge+
ICQ 1800667