I just got home from Doing My Part at the local club's Field Day site.
My part involved taking a receiver out to feed another gyu's RTTY
converter, which fed Yet Another Guy's Teletype Model-15, so we could
print the ARRL Field Day Message. That was good for 100 points, IIRC.
I was given a 20M dipole to use, strung about 30 feet up between some
trees. Tried to copy RTTY on 20M from the dipole, with really cruddy
results. A guy offers this Weird Thing with an SO-23k connector. I
hook a hundred-foot feedlike to it and put it on a picnic table that
far away, and all of a sudden the S4-5 stations are S6-8, and I'm
getting _LOTS_ better copy.
Come 0100Z, I get solid copy from that antenna to a disk file on a PC.
Just before, we tried the dipole again: cruddy, lots of QSB and QRN.
It's described on http://www.qsl.net/ka5ruz/. He calls it the "RUZ"
antenna. I prefer to call it the "CPW" antenna: "Can't Possibly Work".
But it does. I'm fairly well impressed, folks. You ight want to have
a look.
--
Mike Andrews
Tired old sysadmin