As someone who has spent time operating at N0NI during various multi op
efforts, here are a couple of thoughts.
To those of us in Iowa K8CC and K3LR are in a different geographic region. If
anything we think of them as being Mideast istead of Midwest;-)
Take a look at our path to EU and you will see that aurora often gobbles up
many of those DBs the stack yeild (we only wish it was 50 DBs). Yes the stacks
help but when I'm at N0NI and see the big aluminum high in the sky I often
wonder what we could do with the same station if it was a 1,000 or more miles
east of pig farmer heaven.
73 W0ETC
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 22 Mar 2004 18:39:53 -0500
From: "Nat Heatwole" <nat@ajheatwole.com>
To: <cq-contest@contesting.com>
Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] DX Sprint is a good idea
Message: 3
> " I'd much rather be in the Midwest with stacks than in New England
with
> dipoles."
>
> Apparently you've never operated from the Midwest.
>
> 73 Steve K0SR
Apparently you've never operated from the East Coast with dipoles.
A yagi can have on the order of 10dB more gain than a dipole at the same
height. When stacks are involved, one now has the ability to control the
take off angle which can result in 40dB more gain depending on the
propagation. That means that stacks can be up to 50dB louder than a
single dipole at a modest height. And this figure doesn't even encompass
all of the other benefits of stacks: the ability to attenuate rain and
snow static, the ability to beam in more than one direction at once, and
there are no nulls off the side of the antenna to worry about (assuming
that the beams rotate).
One may lose a lot operating from being in the Midwest as opposed to the
East Coast, but I don't think that it's worth 50dB. I don't know of too
many operators who could, using dipoles on the East Coast, beat out
stations like W9RE, WB9Z, W0AIH, N9RV, N0NI, K8CC, K3LR, or the like the
majority of the time.
73!
Nat - WZ3AR
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