"A.Pismo Clam" wrote in message
...
Hello All!

I live in San Diego and have been a PBS supporter for many years. An
article in this months "On Air" PBS magazine has made my day! The
article is on page #3. It is written by the General Manager of the tv
station. I have not read the document in question, but it does sound
too
good to be true. How curious are you? If you live in San Diego, you
might find a copy in your local library.


[snip]

Why do you want to live in a neighborhood in which all the homes have a
dress code? I suppose renters are stuck with such restrictions, but
what do "owners" "own" if they can get hassled for stringing a wire?

Frank Dresser

Frank Dresser wrote:

"A.Pismo Clam" wrote in message
...
Hello All!

I live in San Diego and have been a PBS supporter for many years. An
article in this months "On Air" PBS magazine has made my day! The
article is on page #3. It is written by the General Manager of the tv
station. I have not read the document in question, but it does sound
too
good to be true. How curious are you? If you live in San Diego, you
might find a copy in your local library.


[snip]

Why do you want to live in a neighborhood in which all the homes have a
dress code? I suppose renters are stuck with such restrictions, but
what do "owners" "own" if they can get hassled for stringing a wire?

Frank Dresser


The thought occurs to me that in the "good old days" aircraft used to
have wire antennas, either strung around the airframe or trailing below
and behind.

Modern, high speed, aircraft can't do this so they have various
solutions including HF probes and conformal antennas (I have seen
unpainted panels on some large military aircraft which were identified
as HF antennas) and it is not difficult to receive their signals over
distances of several thousand miles. I wonder why no one has, at least
as far as I am aware, attempted to adapt these solutions to Ham Radio?

I have personal experience, some 40 years ago, with an HF antenna which
consisted of the top half of the tail (about a 15 to 20 foot square
metal surface) which was tuned by a remote ATU (Collins CU-351 ISTR) and
performed at least as well as a fixed wire over the range of 2.5 to 30
MHz. I had considered at one time covering one end of the house with
foil and trying the idea against ground, but for some reason I
encountered some opposition from another member of my household. I think
she figured 15 antennas was enough!


Dave
VE3HLU

Dave Holford article ...

^ I have personal experience, some 40 years ago, with an
^ HF antenna which consisted of the top half of the tail
^ (about a 15 to 20 foot square metal surface) which was
^ tuned by a remote ATU (Collins CU-351 ISTR) and performed
^ at least as well as a fixed wire over the range of 2.5 to
^ 30 MHz.

If I could put an antenna like that 20,000 feet over my house I would be very
happy indeed!

Frank

Frank wrote:

Dave Holford article ...

^ I have personal experience, some 40 years ago, with an
^ HF antenna which consisted of the top half of the tail
^ (about a 15 to 20 foot square metal surface) which was
^ tuned by a remote ATU (Collins CU-351 ISTR) and performed
^ at least as well as a fixed wire over the range of 2.5 to
^ 30 MHz.

If I could put an antenna like that 20,000 feet over my house I would be very
happy indeed!

Frank


Worked very nicely between 50 and 100 feet, and very seldom were we
above 5,000. I am aware of it being used to communicate from Australia
to the East Coast of Canada while on the ground, and I have personally
used it to communicate to North America from Europe while on the ground
- never ran over 400 Watts.

Dave

Frank it's called a "sky hook".

Frank wrote:

Dave Holford article ...

^ I have personal experience, some 40 years ago, with an
^ HF antenna which consisted of the top half of the tail
^ (about a 15 to 20 foot square metal surface) which was
^ tuned by a remote ATU (Collins CU-351 ISTR) and performed
^ at least as well as a fixed wire over the range of 2.5 to
^ 30 MHz.

If I could put an antenna like that 20,000 feet over my house I would be very
happy indeed!

Frank

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 16:31:45 -0500, Dave Holford
wrote:



Frank Dresser wrote:

"A.Pismo Clam" wrote in message
...
Hello All!
snip

The thought occurs to me that in the "good old days" aircraft used to
have wire antennas, either strung around the airframe or trailing below
and behind.

Some still do


Modern, high speed, aircraft can't do this so they have various
solutions including HF probes and conformal antennas (I have seen
unpainted panels on some large military aircraft which were identified
as HF antennas) and it is not difficult to receive their signals over
distances of several thousand miles. I wonder why no one has, at least
as far as I am aware, attempted to adapt these solutions to Ham Radio?

The aircraft has a height above Terrain (HAT) advantage that few homes
are ever going to obtain. :-))


I have personal experience, some 40 years ago, with an HF antenna which
consisted of the top half of the tail (about a 15 to 20 foot square
metal surface) which was tuned by a remote ATU (Collins CU-351 ISTR) and
performed at least as well as a fixed wire over the range of 2.5 to 30
MHz. I had considered at one time covering one end of the house with
foil and trying the idea against ground, but for some reason I
encountered some opposition from another member of my household. I think
she figured 15 antennas was enough!

Then there is the problem of electrical wiring on the inside of the
wall too. :-))

The plane I'm building (335 MPH hot rod) is all advanced composite.
The plans call for the antennas to all be inside. Unfortunately the
VOR antenna is supposed to be in the horizontal stabilizer. They
changed the material so the horizontal stab is all carbon fiber.
Wellll...maybe it'd be good for deicing.

You'll have to fix the return add due to dumb virus checkers, not spam
Roger Halstead (K8RI & ARRL life member)
(N833R, S# CD-2 Worlds oldest Debonair?)
www.rogerhalstead.com


Dave
VE3HLU

Homeowners associations are a good thing! They are basically an agreement
that you and your neighbors will follow some clearly defined rules for the
specific purpose of maintining optimum property values for everyone. In
other words, you won't have to worry about buying an expensive house and
having your next-door neighbor decide to use his yard to store a dozen
wrecked automobiles while he builds a hot-rod or runs a car-repair business.
Common sense should tell anyone that their rights end when they start to
infringe on anyone else's, but sometimes you need it in writing. ;^)

Receiving antennas are easily concealed. If you can find mine from the
street, you were born on Krypton. I think this is an overly-hyped problem.

Broadcasting antennas are another animal, though. For instance, nobody
wants to live next to some clown running a bunch of linear amps through a CB
"base station." It will literally be "seen" on well-shielded cable
television connections, and is a nuisance. I think that's a lot of what the
"external antenna" rules are meant to curb.

-- Stinger

"Frank Dresser" wrote in message
...

"A.Pismo Clam" wrote in message
...
Hello All!

I live in San Diego and have been a PBS supporter for many years. An
article in this months "On Air" PBS magazine has made my day! The
article is on page #3. It is written by the General Manager of the tv
station. I have not read the document in question, but it does sound
too
good to be true. How curious are you? If you live in San Diego, you
might find a copy in your local library.


[snip]

Why do you want to live in a neighborhood in which all the homes have a
dress code? I suppose renters are stuck with such restrictions, but
what do "owners" "own" if they can get hassled for stringing a wire?

Frank Dresser

On Fri, 21 Nov 2003 16:58:40 -0600, "Stinger"
wrote:

|Homeowners associations are a good thing! They are basically an agreement
|that you and your neighbors will follow some clearly defined rules for the
|specific purpose of maintining optimum property values for everyone. In
|other words, you won't have to worry about buying an expensive house and
|having your next-door neighbor decide to use his yard to store a dozen
|wrecked automobiles while he builds a hot-rod or runs a car-repair business.
|Common sense should tell anyone that their rights end when they start to
|infringe on anyone else's, but sometimes you need it in writing. ;^)

I happen to subscribe to Fine Homebuilding Magazine and in one of the
latest issues there is some discussion about people who will not make
any changes to their house without considering resale value. They
could be eight feet tall and planning to remodel the kitchen, but will
they think of raising the height of the countertops to make it easier
on themselves? Nooooo. It will affect resale value. They might be
planning to die in the house but they worry that their heirs will have
a hard time selling.

The same mentality prevails in people who willingly submit to the
whims of the homeowners' association board. If I want to leave my
garage door open while I use my woodworking tools or work on my car, I
don't want the guy across the street getting his panties in a bunch
over it. Likewise, I don't want to be told when to mow the grass.

Of course, in my case, across the street is 80 acres of Sonoran Desert
and my landscaping is whatever grows here. (I gave the lawnmower to
the guy that bought my last house.) And I'm not trying to keep up
with Jones either because where I live, *I'm* Jones. Heh heh.

|
|Receiving antennas are easily concealed. If you can find mine from the
|street, you were born on Krypton. I think this is an overly-hyped problem.


If you don't want to hear anything, by all means conceal your antenna.
Antennas are reciprocal, if they wouldn't work well for transmitting,
they will work equally poorly for receiving.

|
|Broadcasting antennas are another animal, though.

Broadcasting is done by broadcasting stations. Broadcasting is
one-way communication.

Hobbists; licensed radio amateurs (hams), and CBers (not to be
confused with hams) are operating transmitting stations designed for
two-way communications.

|For instance, nobody
|wants to live next to some clown running a bunch of linear amps through a CB
|"base station."

Nobody? That is an all-encompassing term. "Few", "some", "not too
many" might be better. Not that I'm in favor of CBers running illegal
stations.

|It will literally be "seen" on well-shielded cable
|television connections, and is a nuisance.

A "well-shielded" system will not "see" anything of the sort. The
problem will more likely be from some upstanding homeowner, who
wouldn't dare leave his garage door open and violate association
rules, making an illegal tap on the cable.

| I think that's a lot of what the
|"external antenna" rules are meant to curb.

No, most antenna restrictions have nothing to do with the possibility
of interference. The restrictions are for the same reasons as not
wanting the garage door open, the grass an inch too high, painting the
house the wrong shade of white, etc...

In article , "Wes Stewart"
wrote:

Antennas are reciprocal, if they wouldn't work well for transmitting,
they will work equally poorly for receiving.

The reciprocity principle is usually good physics (but watch out for
Faraday rotation). However, the engineering virtues of a good transmitting
and good receiving antenna are different. At HF and below, efficiency is
much less important for receiving than it is for transmitting. The reason
is that the natural noise level is high at these frequencies: at 10 MHz
it's 30 dB above thermal, while a good receiver's noise floor is 10 dB
above thermal. This leaves plenty of room for inefficiency without SNR
degradation. At lower frequencies the natural noise is higher. In practice
10 meters of untuned inverted L into a 500 ohm input suffices to reach the
natural noise floor from 100 kHz to 30 MHz with a good receiver.

Back in the days of the omega navigation system, we used tuned 2 meter
whips to receive signals from around the world in the 10 kHz band.

For the results of quantitative engineering calculations on this subject,
see:

http://anarc.org/naswa/badx/antennas/SWL_longwire.html

--
| John Doty "You can't confuse me, that's my job."
| Home:
| Work:

Wes Stewart ...

^ Antennas are reciprocal, if they wouldn't work well for
^ transmitting, they will work equally poorly for receiving.

I don't believe that. It's been my experience that an antenna used for
receiving will function satisfactorily over a much broader range of
conditions (environment, antenna length, etc.) than it will if used for
transmitting under those same conditions.

Frank