Sometimes on the HF bands you will hear a conversation that goes something
like this:

"The antenna here is an extended double Zepp, hung up between two pine trees,
fed with 100 feet of open wire line."
Or
"The antenna here is a tribander up 50 feet on a crank up tower."

And the guy on the other side of the QSO will reply, "That antenna is doing a
geat job for you, you're 5 and 9 here."

My question is, How does he know? How does he know the antenna is doing a
great job? Because he hears you 5 by 9? Maybe your tribander has negative
gain, your coax has water in it, your RG58 is 300 feet long and your tuner is
not adjusted right. But he tells you he hears you loud, you work other
stations, you are happy, you believe your antenna system is working great.

Antenna performance is a state of mind ?? !!!!!

Some evidence -
There was a report put out by some west coast guys about 8 years ago. They
did a well documented study of gain of several commercial HF yagis. Many of
the newer models, the computer designed ones, outperformed some of the old
standbys. I remember (because I saw their presentation at Dayton) them saying
the KLM KT34 appeared to have its peak gain on 15 meters outside the band,
above 21.450 MHz, although it didn't have the problem on other bands. And the
one that most surprised me was the good old Mosely CL-33 had low gain,
measurably below the competition. I used to own a CL-33 and knew several
other hams who also did. I always was impressed with my beam, the way I could
turn it and peak up stations, turn it around and null them out, call DX and
they came back to me. A friend of mine had one mounted on his roof, 5 feet
over the attic, and was on the DX Honor Roll. So when I heard this report
about the lousy performance of a CL-33 I thought "Is it possible they are
RIGHT, that the CL-33s that thousands of hams owned may not actually work much
better than a dipole?" If an antenna had lossy traps I figured it would have
low gain but might still show the nice pattern that I observed with mine. How
then could these thousands of owners operate for so long with their CL-33s and
not know they were operating at such a disadvantage? Is it possible my friend
who is on the Honor Roll worked all that DX with a (let's say, because I
forget the actual number) 3 db disadvantage? Yeah, I guess so. Maybe he
called the DX a little longer, screamed a little ouder, but he got through,
and he thought part of the reason for his success was his antenna.

I now have a modern yagi. It works the WARC bands as well as 10-20 meters.
I'm happy with it if for no other reason than that. I get reports from DX
that the antenna is working great. They don't know what they are talking
about!!! But I like hearing it.

Next time someone tells you your antenna is working great, ask them
"How do you know?"

Rick K2XT