On 5/30/2011 4:25 PM, Joel Koltner wrote:
"Frank" wrote in message
...
How many amateur radio operators use this kind of academic preening
when they are putting up a dipole.

Not many, certainly... but I would offer that those who do are able to
enjoy the hobby more thoroughly than those who don't. Whether or not
that additional enjoyment makes up for the extra time needed for
learning, well, that's up to each individuals.

I personally care about these things, and even for hams who think they
don't... most all of them have probably thoughts to themselves, at one
point or another, "Hey, what happens if you feed a dipole off-center?,"
and it's nice that someone else has already gone through the effort to
figure it out such that the answers are readily Google-able! :-)


And there's a whole raft of "off center fed" dipoles of one sort or
another out there, particularly for multiband applications, so it's nice
to understand that what's really going on is that the feedpoint
impedance you see is basically the same as feeding at the center, but
run through a "transformer".

A bit of theory helps one evaluate all the "secret recipe worked 1000
countries on top band with 1 Watt and a 3 foot long antenna" stories too.