"Marty" wrote in message ...

I had several little 1/16th watt neon lights laying around doing
nothing. I would toy with them, lining them on dipoles to find the
highest area of RF on the dipoles, once found, I would solder these
little rascals to the dipole so they wouldn't move in the wind.

Besides looking cute, they offered a little bit of help too.
When it was raining, they wouldn't lite at all on a couple of
antennas, and on others were very dim.
This alone tells me that there is some affect of rain on the antennas.

But one question has always perplexed me to no end.
Why will the light light up if placed on the end of my 10 meter mobile
antenna, but not on the end of 10 meter ground plane. It lights up
just fine about 19 inches below the top on the ground plane and about
22 inches below the top on a vertical with an underground radial bed.


One question perplexes me - are you so bored that you can't think of
anything better to do other than solder neon lights to your antenna??? My
God, someone please shoot me if I ever get to that stage!!! ;-)


Actually, i think this might be an interesting experiment.

I would assume the neon lights have a brightness that is proportional
to the RMS voltage, and that the areas of brightest neons are high voltage
(low current) nodes.

One question is how are you hooking them up? On the dipole?


S.

Bill wrote:
"What is the general effect of moisture on antennas and feedlines as
power is increased?"

I worked for years in a shortwave broadcasting plant where transmitters
ranged in power between 3KW and 100 KW. Moisture had little apparent
effect on the 600-ohm open-wire feedlines or curtain and rhombic
antennas at any power level.

We can speculate that wet insulators were slightly conductive when wet
due to disolved impurities. Ohm`s law says current and heat are higher
at high power.

The climate was dry for most of the year but the rainy season was
intense resulting in occasional floods. As I recall, transmission line
flashovers rarely happened in wet weather but dry was the norm and arcs
were infrequent in any case even at 100 KW with 100% high-level
modulation.

From my mediumwave experience I would say that most antenna system
arcing resulted from approaching moisture, not to its arrival.

Approaching thunderstorms are often preceded by charged air sweeping
across the antenna system. Tower guy segments, separated by insulators,
charge until they arc across the insulators with a loud report (Bang!).
This triggers ionized paths which short antenna system parts. This
overloads the transmitter which removes itself from the air to clear the
overload and protect itself. This often repeats rapidly until the storm
actually arrives and the rain starts.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI

Hi S

I just wrap the two wire leads around the dipole wire. The lamp
lights whether the dipole wire is insulated or not, if you have it in
the right place that is.

They also let you know if your on the right antenna too!

TTUL
Gary

am (Gary V. Deutschmann, Sr.) wrote in message ...
Hi S

I just wrap the two wire leads around the dipole wire. The lamp
lights whether the dipole wire is insulated or not, if you have it in
the right place that is.

They also let you know if your on the right antenna too!

TTUL
Gary


Ok, so do you electrically attach the two leads together
make a loop out of them, and then wrap this loop around the
dipole? That's what the other poster seemed to be suggesting,
use an inductive pick-up loop, which essentially shorts the
two leads together (a DC short that is).


Slick

On 21 Apr 2004 12:57:16 -0700, (Dr. Slick) wrote:
Ok, so do you electrically attach the two leads together
make a loop out of them, and then wrap this loop around the
dipole? That's what the other poster seemed to be suggesting,
use an inductive pick-up loop, which essentially shorts the
two leads together (a DC short that is).

Hi OM,

Cut the wires off - it doesn't matter, the energy is in the field and
THAT is what is lighting it up. [Standard lab demo of exciting an
ionized gas.] In the late 70s you would find these lamps at the end
of CB whips.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC

Hi Slick

There does NOT have to be an electrical connection at all.
You can use lamps that have the leads broken off completely and it
works just fine.

TTUL
Gary

am (Gary V. Deutschmann, Sr.) wrote in message ...
Hi Slick

There does NOT have to be an electrical connection at all.
You can use lamps that have the leads broken off completely and it
works just fine.


Oh yeah, like the tesla coil-flourescent light trick.

Ok, but will the neon lights be able to show you the high
voltage nodes and the high current nodes on the antenna, depending
on their location along the antenna? Is the brightness of the
neon proportional to the RMS voltage?

Or is the brightness only proportional to the effective radiated
power?


Slick

Hi Slick

Your getting above my head on that one.

I know if I move the light back and forth a few inches it will dim and
then go out, there are several points along a dipole where the lamp
will have high brightness and this is where I put the lamps.

I know the CBers used to put a neon lamp on the tip of their mobile
antenna's. I first tried it on a 10 meter mobile and it worked fine.
But on a ground plane it didn't work, then I started moving the light
down the shaft of the antenna and found a spot where it did work just
great.

Back in the good ole days of the Heathkit Sixer lunchbox, I could put
a flourescent lamp against my mobile antenna and it would light up on
transmit. I never could get it to do that when I was using the Saturn
V halo though.

TTUL
Gary

am (Gary V. Deutschmann, Sr.) wrote in message ...
Hi Slick

Your getting above my head on that one.

I know if I move the light back and forth a few inches it will dim and
then go out, there are several points along a dipole where the lamp
will have high brightness and this is where I put the lamps.

I know the CBers used to put a neon lamp on the tip of their mobile
antenna's. I first tried it on a 10 meter mobile and it worked fine.
But on a ground plane it didn't work, then I started moving the light
down the shaft of the antenna and found a spot where it did work just
great.

Back in the good ole days of the Heathkit Sixer lunchbox, I could put
a flourescent lamp against my mobile antenna and it would light up on
transmit. I never could get it to do that when I was using the Saturn
V halo though.


So it sounds like once you find an area where the neon bulb is
very bright, that the brightness will be proportional to the ERP, or
the power that is delivered to the antenna.

This might be a decent, fast-and-dirty sort of power meter, where
you can tell if something is wrong if the bulb isn't as bright as it
should be (assuming it's not raining).


S.

Hi Slick

Back when I first got into ham radio, I was just a poor widdle kid and
had to home brew my first couple of rigs or get some really old
Eicocraft or abandoned Heath gear for the shack.
My first receiver was a simple HR10B if I have the number right and I
had home brewed a simple 40/80 meter single tube transmitter.
I saved up my money from working after school and built an HW101,
which I still owned up until only a few short years ago.

The only SWR meter I had was one I picked up at a swap fest for 5
bucks. I think it was originally made for CBer's but covered all of
the HF spectrum, but also could only handle up to around 10 watts.

My first antenna's were simple dipoles, and because I could only
afford one length of coax I connected all of my antennas spider
fashion without a balun (didn't even know what one of those were back
then). But fortunately, the old rigs had a lot of tolerance for
mismatched loads and high SWRs. Little by little I would get my
antennas in tune.
I enjoyed CW so much that I spent almost 20 years using nothing but CW
on HF, having never once plugged a microphone into my HW101 back then.


After I learned to drive, I even ran CW in my car, using a military
code key that clipped to my leg with a large clamp designed for that
purpose. I wish I still had the abilities I had back when I was a
bubble gummer! CW was just like talking to me, I heard the words not
the individual letters, never had to write anything down.

Then I got sick and was out like a light for over a week, had caught
that darn Hong Kong flu virus, which was bad enough, but about a week
after that I was hit with Encephalitis which caused a large memory
loss and I have had periods of decreasing epileptic seizures ever
since. They are now about 8 to 10 years apart and mild, but wipe out
small parts of recent memory.

After surviving the Encephalitis attack, CW was as strange to me as it
would be someone who never ever heard it before. It was a long hard
road to learn it all over again, and it gave all of those I normally
talked with on CW a chance to get their come uppance by getting even
with me by using higher and higher speeds. I never regained my
ability to hear the words as plainly as before.

A number of years later, long after marriage, kids and eventually
buying a home, a mild seizure caused my engineerings skills to
deteriorate considerable, but at the same time made learning
electronics a snap. Things at work were virtually over my head and I
left that engineering companies employ and went to a company where I
worked my way into chip level repairs in their electronics division.
Everything just came natural to me, almost like I knew it my whole
life. There was not a circuit board problem that I couldn't fix.
Then after working there for about 4-1/2 years, I got hit with another
seizure, this one a little rougher than the last.
The boss liked my work and held my position open for me. I went back
to work, but wouldn't accept any pay until I could get back into the
swing of things. I tied up a station for almost three months and
could not grasp anything. Even trying to repair a simple analog power
supply was far beyond my capabilities and I just wasn't getting
anything back. So I left and got back into something I had done from
my youth, and for the rest of my life had stayed away from anything
learned beyond the age of 18, as I never forgot things from back then,
except the CW from my first sickness.

I was working in electronics when I designed the antenna's I placed on
my web page, they were good designs and worked great. I could run
with the best of them in describing the hows and whys these antennas
performed so well for me. But along with my memory loss in
electronics, also came my memory loss regarding these antennas, other
than I know they worked. I can look at my calculations and formulas
and just go duh, having no idea what they mean. It's very frustrating
to say the least. Makes one look like a blithering idiot most of the
time, especially when you talk to someone you had given excellent
advice to years earlier and now you can't even tie a shoelace so to
speak!

My web pages went unchanged for years because I couldn't remember how
to access them or write the changes in .html, had to learn that all
over again too! A royal pain.

Although you don't hear about it much, there are about 1 in every
10,000 who have the same types of problems I do, and about 1 in every
1,000 who suffer from the same illness, just affected in different
ways, like loss of large or small motor skills, temporary deafness,
temporary blindness, that lasts for months or in some cases
permanently, etc.

I have been one of the fortunate ones if you view it in a certain
light. I may forget everything, but something else has always seemed
to take it's place and be so sharp that it becomes natural to me. The
downside is, you have to change jobs every few years. So I decided to
work for myself, that way I wouldn't disappoint another employer down
the road who came to count on me. I've tried, but I just can come to
firing myself, hi hi.....

TTUL
Gary