Sure wish I could put up such a "no antenna" antenna from my apartment where the noise level is often 20 or more dB over S9. Working any DX on even FT8 is a real rare occurence from here where I have a mobile antenna working against an iron railing on my second floor balcony.
On Thu, Jul 16, 2020, 12:05 Paul Christensen <[email protected]> wrote: > >"And I have one that says "RTTY" but it's now a Digital DXCC. I had to > resort to FT8 to work Monaco to get on the Digital Honor Roll, with the > other 330 having been on RTTY." > > Just to quickly add my input before the topic is canned. > > I'm not enamored with FT8 but just for grins, I conducted an FT8 experiment > a few months ago to see how many countries I could work with no antenna > terminated at the end of a broken open-feeder transmission line. That's > right - no antenna, just a hunk of balanced open feeder line that sits > unterminated on my backyard fence. Using a 100W rig with output power > turned down to 20W, SWR is off-scale. I work on my own gear. If I blow it > up, so be it. > > Over a few weeks I worked about 35 countries on 20m and 11 countries on > 40m, > all FT8 of course. No antenna and sky high SWR. By now, folks are > thinking."yeah no antenna, but your line is the antenna, balanced or not." > That's right. There's just enough imbalance between the two conductor > feeders that the line has some radiation. The imbalance is caused by the > usual culprits like proximity to aluminum gutters and some inherent > imbalance between the rig and feeder. However, it just goes to show that > skill to make FT8 DX contacts rests largely with the algorithm. Frankly, > most of the skill needed is in learning to install and configure the WSJT-X > software - which isn't difficult. As such, I find it amusing that anyone > considers FT8 an accomplishment - and a semi-automatic one at that. But > for > those who feel it is an accomplishment, there's no point in denying their > satisfaction. > > Paul W9AC > > > > > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:[email protected] > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html > Message delivered to [email protected] > ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:[email protected] This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to [email protected]
