[TowerTalk] OCF Dipole

[Jim Brown]

I've written extensively on this and given talks at ham events. Both the 
writing and slides for the talks are on my website, so I won't repeat 
them here. If you care about the answer, read them.

What I WILL say here is this -- these antennas DO work, often quite 
well, for TRANSMITTING. There's nothing wrong about that concept, and 
how they work has been clearly understood for much of last century.

Their downside is that they are a sitting duck for the RF noise that has 
increasingly surrounded our stations that prevent us from HEARING all 
but the loudest stations that we want to work. Except for power line 
noise, none of these noise sources existed until about the last 15-20 
years -- the sources are all sorts of electronic devices and el-cheapo 
power supplies for our devices. The average home has several dozen of 
them. Multiply that by the number of homes close to your antenna(s). Any 
imbalance in an antenna causes the feedline to be part of the antenna. 
On TX, it doesn't matter, but on RX, because that feedline runs much 
closer to those noise sources than the antenna (the antenna is up high, 
so farther away, it gets more signal and less noise).

73, Jim K9YC

On Mon,12/12/2016 9:29 AM, Wilson Lamb wrote:
> Never miss a chance to offer an uninformed opinion or dumb question!
> What exactly does “unbalanced” mean in the context of the OCF feedline?