"Gary Schafer" wrote in message
...



You want both antennas if you can do it. Anyone who declares one or the
other the winner is simply wrong.

- 73 de Mike KB3EIA -

I did some tests a couple of years ago on 10 meters between vertical
and horizontal on an 1800 mile path. It seems that there is quite a
bit of rotation in polarity of the signal from minute to minute. I
tried right and left hand circular to confirm that it was rotation.

73
Gary K4FMX


Cross-polarization losses are in the neighborhood of 10-20 dB at VHF and
above. With my license, I cannot do HF, so others may chime in with those
numbers. Assuming ... there's that word ... that the random polarization
variations ("rotations") are around some central figure, during for a given
QSO, then one antenna will work better -- the one that happens to be optimum
for that path and for the antenna on the other end of the QSO.

There exists a phenomenon that I do not understand well, called Faraday
rotation, where an EM wave passing through a magnetic field will undergo a
polarization "alteration", so to speak. Thus, two verticals on the ends of
a long-distance QSO might not perform as well as if one were a vertical and
the other a horizontal -- due to the Earth's magnetic field.

John
KD6VKW