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Steve Bonine · May 17th 07, 01:47 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.moderated

wrote:

I'm now up
to over 6,000 feet of vinyl insulated #12 and #14 radials for my 160m
inverted L using this method. There are no whirring metallic objects,
no chain saws. There's no digging and very little effort.

When I read what Dave had written, it struck me that it's an
illustration of a trait that I have observed often in our hobby: It has
to be done *exactly* the right way. A 1.2:1 SWR isn't good enough.
Radials have to be *buried* since obviously they won't be as effective
if they're just laid on the ground. Yeah, several hours of back
breaking work and possibly risking your life might gain you 1 db that no
one will be able to detect . . . or maybe not even that. We need to be
a bit more forgiving of non-optimum solutions and do a bit more
cost/benefit analysis on the work it takes to convert them to optimum
solutions.

An illustration comes to mind. When I was working in Mississippi in the
Katrina aftermath, the Red Cross asked the hams to provide their feeding
vehicles (ERVs) with communications while they were on station. ["ERV"
stands for "emergency response vehicle".] An HT was insufficient to hit
the local repeater system. We had mobile 2m tranceivers to put one in
each ERV, but the mag mount antennas were useless because ERVs aren't
magnetic (fiberglass and aluminium). When I suggested using the
existing antenna that was already mounted on the side of the ERV for the
Red Cross radio, the response was "Oh, no, we can't do that -- it won't
match for 2 meters." And sure enough, it didn't . . . but it was plenty
good enough to do the job, and modern transmitter circuity is perfectly
capable of coping with a huge mismatch.

What I'm trying to say is that "good enough" works fine in many cases,
and the incremental effort to move to "perfect" often isn't justified.

73, Steve KB9X