"Won't work" is an absolute term applied to a purely relative
situation. If you had an antenna that somehow wasted 99% of your power
(i.e., only one watt made it out of your antenna for every 100 watts you
put into it), many of us would probably tell you that it was a terrible
antenna. And it would be ... but it would only be down about four
S-units from a "proper" antenna and it would therefore still give you
S-5 contacts (perfectly readable in most situations) when propagation
was giving S-9 contacts to others. There really isn't any such thing as
"won't work", but there is such a thing as being knowledgeable and prudent.
The same pretty much holds for gear. Most of us DO know that we can
make lots of contacts with extremely simple and inexpensive gear if we
aren't too particular about when and to where those contacts occur.
There is an entire subset of hams who get their kicks from seeing what
they can do with as little (both physically and electronically) as
possible, but most of them aren't wasting the result of their efforts on
grossly inefficient antennas to boot.
I can straddle a log on a river and paddle it with my hands for the
back-to-nature feel of it, but given the choice I'd probably prefer a
simple canoe instead.
73,
Dave AB7E
On 6/5/2013 7:50 AM, GEO Badger wrote:
As pointed out by others here, we put up many antennas and used cheap, err
inexpensive, gear and made lots of contacts and we didn't know our set-ups
wouldn't work. Now we know they won't work.
Why?
---
Ciao baby, catch you on the flip side.
GEO
http://www.w3ab.org
"There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line." -
Oscar Levant
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