Well to try and reply to some of the comments . . . (and apologies that I am
repeating myself, but clearly some haven't read all my posts on this
subject)
I'm certainly NOT trying to suggest that a decent Vertical isn't a good DX
antenna for 160m.
And my own observations certainly show that a decent Vertical is ESSENTIAL
to work DX on 80m. To me, that proves that DX Propagation on 80m is almost
always quite Low Angle.
However, I also believe that most of the "Experts", even those that have
written books on the subject, have come down from 80m, and believe that 160m
DX Propagation is the same . . . whereas my own experience of working DX on
Top band for the past 50 years convinces me that is NOT the case !
I'm pretty sure that it's probably at a kind of Medium Angle most of the
time . . . maybe 30 or 40 degrees, due to being reflected between layers, or
multi-hop. That's regardless of whether the stations are 3,000 miles, 6,000
miles or 10,000 miles apart.
As I have repeatedly stated, I have done hundreds of signal comparisons
against various British DXers over the decades with DX Stations, and found
that most of the time there is little to choose between my horizontal
Half-waves and their Verticals.
Maybe it's something unique about this country, the ground, it's position on
the globe . . . I really have no explanation.
And there's certainly nothing special about my current Dipole. The centre is
mounted on a pole on the roof of my house which is 50ft to the top, one end
goes to a tree, the other to another building. It's fed with LMR400 and a
big choke balun, so no vertical radiation from it. And I have had similar
antennas at 6 different QTHs at different ends of England over the past 50
years, all of which have worked much the same.
But the whole point is that it's not just these days that I can easily
compare my signals against other Gs with DX by using RBN . . . I have done
direct comparisons on SSB with hundreds of DX stations for decades. Heck,
25 years ago there was a group of us coming on every morning for months
working a bunch of VKs and ZLs on SSB, so it was easy to compare reports.
All the other Gs had big verticals with 40+ radials - some had Inverted Ls,
a couple had 120ft towers. But they were amazed that I was consistently as
good a signal as they were . . . and I was often receiving even better !
And even since starting this discussion on here, I've had lots of direct
emails from North American stations telling me that I am consistently as
good a signal as the other English DXers (all running Verticals).
So perhaps you can understand why I get a little angry when anyone suggests
that I am somehow kidding myself, or that the results should be taken with a
pinch of salt !
I can't explain why some of you guys get poor DX results using Dipoles . . .
I can only recount my own experiences and direct comparisons against people
using Verticals.
73 Roger G3YRO
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