All: thanks for all the clarification. I don't have the reciever yet, but I downloaded the manual and it has a jack for the antenna and another for the ground. The manual says, as Tom mentions that I can just run a ground wire along the floor if it's of equal length to the antenna wire, or I can use the shortest lead possible and connect that to a water pipe. I have a vent pipe pretty close to where this will likely be used, and I assume that will work the same as any other water pipe. I've ben reading some about this, and it seems to be a rather emotional topic for some folks, kind of like dog training I guess.
Thanks again. Bill Stephan, Kansas City MO Email: [email protected] Phone: (816)803-2469 -original message- Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Antenna construction question From: carl <[email protected]> Date: 12/16/2008 14:47 hav you thort of a di poal or a long wire? ----- Original Message ----- From: Tom Fowle To: [email protected] Sent: Tuesday, December 16, 2008 8:15 PM Subject: Re: [BlindHandyMan] Antenna construction question william, You don't ground the antenna except in some weird cases. Every antenna is actually two elements, one may be a wire or a vertical whip, and the other is often ground. Or you can have so-called dipoles which are two identical elements end to end. The arguments about what is a real ground go on for ever, but basically if you're doing some kind of wire antenna, the radio will also have a ground connection that needs to be taken care of. You can have a wire "under" the antenna running along the ground, floor or whatever that's the same length as the actual antenna. What you'll most likely do is to run a wire from the radio's ground connection to perhaps a water pipe or even the ground conductor of the electrical system. For general receiving this will do fine. There are truly endless configuration spossible and endless discussions of them good and bad. About all you can say about antennas for sure is that most radios need one. Tom Fowle WA6IVG [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
