"How's the 10-ft Mast going to do as much good for a wire antennas, the ground losses would be terrible?" "You can find telescoping carbon fiber fishing poles over 60 ft long on ebay" Maybe i was feeling a little surly after this super fun pileup My wire was only about 8' off the ground during this SOTA activation. Worked a super fun pileup on 20m and then a Japan on 15m. 73 de Tim N7KOM
I have a random wire hung at roughly 6 feet in the woods behind my house. I am surprised at some of the contacts I have made with it, forgot to switch back over to the DX commander and used the end fed instead.
Ho-hum. I am so tired of this "Will it work?" -- "Does it work?" "That won't work!" same old endless argument/question/answer nonsense. Pointless, sheer stupidity in my opinion. When it comes to antennas EVERYTHING WORKS! It is all a matter of degree as to HOW WELL it will work. The OP could have laid the antenna on the ground and he still would have made contacts (especially so with an efficient mode like CW). He could have hooked up a light bulb and made contacts. Dummy loads have been used for dx contacts to prove this, too. Would he have made the same contacts if his wire was 50 feet in the air? Probably, plus a great deal more!
Pretty cool, I like the ultra-light approach with a short mast. But it's all relative, right? EFHW wire? Perhaps with a 20' pole your signals would have been even louder? I once worked Australia from Connecticut running 3 watts on 10m FM (!) to a 1/4 wave vertical with NO radials or other ground. Should be impossible. But if propagation allows... 73, W1LJ
Question: Out of all of those contacts that you made from the top of a summit, how many of them were with stations that had their antenna only 8 feet above ground?
With so many tall trees right next to you - why not toss a line into the tree and use that as a "mast"? I routinely use a hiking pole (trekking pole) as part of my antenna 'system' - along with a tree. Looks like you had fun. However - the gloating part runed the vid for me.
Nah....It's more like the click bait Ham Tuber look at me, look at me, bat-signal has been activated. The only thing missing is the clown face to go along with it.
Does anyone else feel there's a bit of age discrimination creeping into the title of the video? I'm the first to call myself an OM when I'm working CW, but this has somewhat of the sound of my son when he was a teenager, talking about how my opinions were not valid any longer.
