Yes, if it conducts it will radiate. This is the put up the any old
thing philosophy.
However, experimentation is expensive and time consuming and has the
possibility of hobbling ones signal. That can lead to giving up operating.
Why not first try and learn from the available data on existing
antennas? Trouble is that there is so much misinformation and innuendo
that separating the wheat from the chaff is difficult.
Also not every antenna began as an experiment. Many of the designs were
created by pencil and paper and available antenna theory first, then
tried. It wasn't just throw up a piece of wire in the air.
Today we are fortunate to have EZNEC and other programs which model
antennas. One can "try before you buy" and make comparisons with a
standard antenna such as a dipole. One can find something near optimum
for ones constraints and have a pretty good idea how it will work. Also
you'll know what impedances it will have. No point of designing an
antenna you can't match.
Or you can just listen to what some friend says works and throw that up.
73 de Brian/K3KO
On 6/5/2013 12:23, r miles wrote:
I won't try to comment on the theory of the engineers. I can just speak
of my personal experience with one. Because of the location of the
center support I had to try an OCF. My short side actually sloped a bit.
I simply put a half wave long 160m OCF with the peak height of 51'. 50
ohm coax to a 4:1 balun at the feed point. It was no world beater but
in 3 yr.s running 500w I did work 127 DXCC entities.
In 54 yr.s in the hobby I still tell new OPs: try it. If you are
limited by whatever reason give your antenna thoughts a real world try.
Don't let the nay sayers put you off. Put up what you can & see if it
works. We are experimenters. That's why we are called amateur operators.
One of the new hams in our club lives in an apartment. He's playing with
a very small loop on HF. In the last few months he's wrkd about a dozen
entities. Not too bad. He put up something & gave it a try.
Every antenna we consider standard started life as an experiment....
K9IL
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