Oh gosh, Al, don't mention the CFA. It might produce more list traffic than
the dropping of the code requirement. This is the antenna industry's answer
to Cold Fusion and the Pogue Carburetor that runs a car on water. It stands
for Crossed Field Antenna, which was invented by a very colorful Scotsman
named Maurice Hately, who published it in the early 80s in Wireless World.
Its an extremely intriguing antenna concept that has produced more
controversy than it has ever produced RF. It has more junk science
surrounding it than Area 51.
On the other hand, Mr. Hateley is very sincere in his insistence that these
things work and he and some of his supporters continue to publish
tantalizing articles on their variations of Maxwell's Equations. He also
built some industrial strength CFA antennas for a handful of HF and MF
broadcast stations around the world, and wouldn't you know the results are
inconclusive, or shrouded in the mystery of "proprietary results."
Controversies like the CFA keep life interesting, is my opinion. I built a
few CFAs years ago because I thought they would be great mobile antennas for
160 and 80 meters. But alas, no matter what I did they were DOA. Since
then, some earnest and diligently objective antenna experimenters built CFAs
and their mysterious variants (the ETH, for example) and have also found
them to be DOA. But like Area 51 junkies there is always a small group of
CFA and ETH promoters still pushing these things on the antenna email lists.
If you are interested, there is a long history of experimentation and
publication on CFA on http://www.antennex.com. They have beat it to death
and have never got one to do anything more than radiate in what they call
"Isotron mode", where the role of the antenna is to cause the feedline to
radiate like mad. Also do some Google searches on "Cross Field Antenna" or
"Crossed-Field Antenna". You will find hours of entertaining reading. Or
you may find yourself wanting to go back to the sites about California
Federation of Aromatherapists.
Dudley - WA1X
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 19:57:37 -0700
From: "Al Williams" <alwilliams@olywa.net>
Subject: [TowerTalk] CFA?
To: <towertalk@contesting.com>
Message-ID: <004701c58f32$4fb69630$25daadd8@PAPASDELL>
Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="iso-8859-1";
reply-type=original
snip
>
> --- Bill Aycock W4BSG wrote:
>
>> It is fine to defend the CFA "inventor"
A google search shows CFA can stand for: Cat Fanciers' Association,
Chartered Financial Analyst, Compact Flash Association, Canadian Franchise
Association, California Federation of Aromatherapists
(!!!!!) but I have 3,999,980 hits left to check out? Maybe some towertalker
can define CFA as used in this posting.
k7puc
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