[TenTec] magic wire antennas

[Stuart Rohre]

There is a fine line on what you can get away with selling over Internet.
As long as they do not use the U. S. mails, it can be hard to prove
interstate commerce fraud.  As long as certain claims are not made, they are
not in violation.  There are technical uncertainties that they can use to
fog their marketing of the Maxcomm resistor loaded coupler.  I doubt they
are selling them to the government now.  They probably did sell a few back
in the days before the ARRL expose of their fraud.  It is surprising, that
they can exist, but as P. T. Barnum said, well you know about fools.

Now the B&W antenna is a different beast.  It is designed legit to be
a broad resistive load for maintaining a control on SWR over a wide range of
HF frequencies as used in Automatic Link Establishment FEMA and military HF
radios.  The reason it is not good for ham use, is we do not have the power
luxury of Uncle, and work in narrow discrete bands.
It is easier for us to make resonant, efficient or multiband antennas, and
not waste our power in a SWR leveling circuit, as in the B&W.  It is foolish
for a ham to give up half or more of his signal just to not twist some tuner
knobs.   The non technical folks that operate some government radios, are
sometimes not competent to run a tuner, and since the radio changes
frequencies without their input, the antenna has to be much broader than
ordinary resonant antennas to follow the radio frequency hopping.

-Stuart
K5KVH