Topband: Saved by my BOG

[N7DF]

This morningaround 1300Z i saw on dxscape  that tx5twas on 3655 ssb    since 80 meters ssb was one of the two band modes I stillneed them on I thought to give it a try    on my cage all I heard was a constantunbroken static crash so I started switching around to different antennas tosee if I could hear them on anything      I found that my west facing experimentalBOG was the only thing that I could hear them on    this antenna has never worked very well foranything before so it was quite a surprise especially since in its presentconfiguration it violates  just about everythingI have read about BOGs   it is about 300feet long made of twisted pair military communications wire lying on the groundand running downhill at right angles to an overhead 7500 volt 3 phase powerlineand beside a barbed wire fence and a one inch diameter steel cable lying on theground marking the property line    it isunterminated and the receiving end is connected to a ten turn winding on aferrite core of unknown properties    the other end of the winding is connected tothe wire I dropped down into the abandoned well hole I commented about in anearlier post  the secondary winding ofthe toroid is a hundred turns of wire connected through a length of rg6 coax toa polimar preamp  this configuration wasarrived at after various hookups with matching transformers and single wiretuners that gave the best signal to noise ratios over powerline noise on westcoast stations  but it never has workedfor anything else    another surprisingthing about the BOG is that it picks up a warbling signal around 7 mhz that I donot hear on any other antenna    30 milesto my west is the white sands missile range and there are frequently strange rf signalson hf  vhf  and uhf coming up from there  including one time a multigigawatt EMP thatwiped out the programming on my ft1000mp but that is another story   anyway I got my qso with tx5t73 larry n7df