Topband: The band sans noise

[Arthur Delibert]

You don't need to be in the sticks to put up one or two pennants and get a lot of mileage out of them.  I have a fairly small suburban back yard; the other houses are pretty close, and they seem to have every kind of RF noise-maker imaginable.  Based on where the trees are, I put up two pennants, one facing east and one facing northwest, each with a DX Engineering pre-amp at the antenna.  They do a very good job of knocking down the noise level, and the pre-amps produce very little in the way of AM BCB mixing products.

I'd like to give you A/B comparisons with other receiving antennas, but I took them down a long time ago, because they just weren't cutting it.

Art Delibert, KB3FJO

> Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2016 08:36:26 -0500
> From: ranchorobbo at gmail.com
> To: topband at contesting.com
> Subject: Topband:  The band sans noise
> 
> >Q For you folk in the quiet locations, enjoy and protect!
> 
> It's a losing battle.   You can't stop the imported appliance tsunami
> that has been going on for years, or consumers buying them and
> bringing them home and using them.  You can run around and try, good
> luck with that, and invest hours and days of your ham hobby time on
> that instead of what is enjoyable with your remaining years, and maybe
> have a few successes, out of many slammed doors, but for every success
> there will be 10 more gadgets coming to a house near you and getting
> fired up.  That ship has sailed--the FCC in the U.S. has washed their
> hands pretty much, similar to their abandonment of CB enforcement.
> Small government and unfettered commerce have won and to be clear, I
> am not generally opposed to small gov't and commerce, but in this case
> hams took a hit and that's life.
> 
> It pays to focus on what you CAN control, which is the stuff on your
> property, and RF coming on to your property.  Unless you are not tied
> to a job and can move (the only really effective solution) you have to
> break out the wallet and spend some doe re mi on a pair of Pixel Loop
> antennas and one of the DX Engineering phasing boxes.  If you have
> room for anything bigger and farther apart like Flags, Pennants,
> beverages and so on, you are probably already in the sticks and don't
> have as much of a problem.
> 
> 73
> 
> Rob
> K5UJ
> _________________
> Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband