In message , Wayne
writes





As a young man I was given a problem of solving poor antenna
performance on an aircraft band fixed station antenna. The SWR at the
transmitter was close to 1:1, but the antenna didn't work well.
I climbed up on the tower and found that the coax had never been
connected to the antenna. That was with about 400 feet of coax at 120
MHz.

A length of coax, which has (say) at least 10dB loss at the frequency of
interest, can indeed make a superb SWR dummy load!
--
Ian