D. Peter Maus wrote:

Many SW portables do have adequate sensitivity to perform well below
30 Mhz with the built-in whip, or a fairly short length of wire. More
than 20 feet on many can lead to overload issues on some rigs.

But for handheld widebands, an longer antenna is needed. There are
many options available. I've seen and used whips of a meter or more in
length for HF on my R-10. A bit cumbersome, but not bad performance. An
external antenna that connects to the BNC mount on the rig is useful for
mobile monitoring. And some fixed base operations.

For a while, Grove made a rubber ducky with an amplifier for HF that
works quite well on better handheld widebands, like those by ICOM and
AOR, Yupiteru and others. I have one and it's a nice performer down to
MW. No longer made, but the circuit is fairly simple. It can easily be
replicated.


I've read that many of those so called 'DC to Daylight' portables
aren't that hot on shortwave. Have you heard of anything in that
respect? It would be nice to have it computer controlled, for the ease
of a frequency database.



mike