snip
Mike,
As a Londoner you will appreciate the following. When the war finished
I started my first real schooling at a school that was surrounded by
blocks of debris
but the school was still standing. It was destroyed in WW1 with about
30+ kids dead.
Finally dad got demobbed and came home to our house which was a bomb
damaged house
because the other house was flattened.We as a pair went to Petticote
lane on Sundays
because dad had a interest in radio and I had to get the water
batteries to run it.
One day dad came back from Petticoat lane and brought home with him a
coil of wire
that you plugged into an outlet and that was the new antenna. I had
not had much
schooling up to that time and at the age of 14 had only one year
before one had
to leave and go to work. Mum got me into a school at dockside for
ships
engineers and navigators and tho a year late I at least got two years
of
education despite the war which followed by years
and years of night school I got the education that any college kid
even tho
I was 10 years older. Now I have the mantra that if it is" resonant
and in a
state of equilibrium" it is what I call a Gaussian antenna. So here
at near
the end of my life I finally got to the bottom of the science that
dad
put before me as peace settled on the East End of London. What dad
plugged into the wall was an antenna that was "resonant and in a
state
of equilibrium" and where its resonance was in the AM band.
60 years later his son resolved the question because of the pursuit
of an education.
Shame he isn't alive to hear 'the rest of the story'
Cheers and beers
Art Unwin KB9MZ.......XG

Art

Even though I was born some years after the war ended, I do have some old
magazines and articles that mention such an antenna. I believe that there
were two or three (perhaps more) rival designs around in the 50's possibly
into the early 60's that claimed to improve radio reception dramatically.
The arrival and shift of interest into television seems to have sounded the
death knell for these devices.

As I recall, some of the pundits at the time were rather disparaging about
these miracle antennas and indeed most designs were proved to be fraudulant,
but one design did actually work and genuinely provided improved
performance. I would guess that this was probably the one your dad acquired.
I believe the design that worked did so because it achieved a genuine
impedence match wereas the others were just devices that hooked up the radio
to the house mains and used that to provide an antenna. Not very safe at
all!!! One device proved to be just a high resistance wirewound resistor
connected to the mains.

So the genuine device did achieve provide a proper match and achieved a kind
of what might be termed equilibrium with the receiver. These devices weren't
particularly cheap to buy either. Looking at antenna prices today, I see
that hundreds of dollars can be spent on a couple of dollars worth of
fibreglass, aluminium and a bit of wire, so things haven't changed that much
I guess. That is surely why rec.radio.amateur.antenna exists and is so
popular; to provide an alternative to those people that do want to think for
themselves rather than blindly following the path commercial manufacturers
dictate.

Regards

Mike G0ULI