[TenTec] New and Improved Terminology

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

Searching the internet has proven useless. All the modern links say it 
was used by the German military during WW2, but it never says when it 
began to be called NVIS. I saw a couple references to Pat Hawker's 
Technical Topics on NVIS and I have the complete antenna collection that 
I'll browse for some history.

80s sounds like when the name was invented. I recall commenting at a 
radio club meeting when the topic of NVIS was announced that we'd been 
doing that for eons, so what's new? The name I guess.

My dad and I started out with a 40m vertical in '55 for our novice 
station. After I moved away from home I had a 10m beam and a short 80 
meter wire that worked home quite well. Later I got up longer wires but 
not very high. When I raised the middle of the 80 meter double extended 
zepp to 55 feet, it worked home OK but not as great as when it was at 30 
feet end to end.

73, Jerry, K0CQ

On 12/30/2010 9:25 PM, Ken Brown wrote:
>
>> We used low antennas out of necessity long before the military called
>> them NVIS and on 80 and 40 worked the surrounding states very well for
>> ragchews, nets, and FD.
> When I was a Novice, my mentors called it "short haul skip." One of
> those was a former Air Force radio man, and if NVIS had been a common
> term used by the Air Force, I probably would have heard it from him. I
> did not hear that term until perhaps the 80s. Maybe it did come from the
> military. I'm curious about it's origin. Maybe the Army or Navy used it,
> but I'm pretty sure the Air Force did not use that term back in the 60s
> or 70s.
>
> DE N6KB
>