That's nice, you still are turning better than 99 % of your rf to heat. And quite frankly, we have no way if knowing if your map was worked with that dummy load, or if you used a real antenna. Rege
Horizontal antennas are given magical properties by many who never had the opportunity to use dozens of (different) antennas at a single time. Rege
had no issues with accent lol Good day good day mate ! i found this to be very interesting very well done brother ! god bless you all and good dx 73
And what is the point of thinking VSWR is what makes a good antenna? Its another computer designed dummy load... Rege
Its only a EFHW on a band where it is a half-wave. All other bands it may 'work' it is more akin to a random wire.
I built an EFHW 134' starts about 25 feet off the ground and goes up to about 55 feet (the only tree that height in my yard). It may not be the most efficient thing, but it tunes easy and works well. Also have a 256 foot dipole fed with 600 ohm ladder line. Goes from my chimney to that same tree and the other end goes out in the woods across many trees (did that with a drone). That antenna works ok too. I like the EFHW a little better.
Almost anything outdoors will radiate enough to make people happy. Even lossy antennas just laying in trees, or end feds with poor grounds. I've worked all over the world on 160 meters CW using a mobile antenna that is less than 1% efficiency, and it even is better than some big home station antennas at such a poor efficiency. Antennas are always a compromise between time, construction problems, money, and performance. The only problem I have with any antenna is when people say it something it is clearly not. Whether someone actually notices a problem is different than if something has a problem. For example after a dismal almost no contact Field Day using end feds of various types, we put up a few fan dipoles for Field day one year. I also had a long wire with a tuner at the wire using a tall tennis court fence as an RF ground. We still let people bring their end fed half waves and random wires with any grounding they wanted. The end fed half wave and/or random antennas with 9:1's made very poor contact rates compared to the other antennas, and they caused all sorts of interstation interference. The dipoles and the well-grounded (to the huge chain link fence) long wire antenna so clean we could run SSB and CW on the same band at the same time. If any of those antenna were out by themselves, any of them could have made someone happy. But as it was side-by-side with better antennas, very few enjoyed or wanted to use the compromise antennas.
That is probably true for any antenna used by amateurs. About the only way to avoid that pitfall is to understand the broad theoretical framework and critically examine the design in question. I don't see evidence of that in most amateur writeups.
Don't tell my antenna it doesn't work. I'll need a whole day to talk it back into working again, hi hi
The fact that you have worked a lot of DX, always get good signal reports, have a low SWR, don't notice any common mode current problems, etc., doesn't mean that you have a good antenna system. What really matters is antenna EFFICIENCY, how much of the power that enters the feedline is radiated as RF energy and not wasted as heat. Any antenna system that causes any of its components to significantly rise in temperature is wasting power. This also applies to the received signals, they are being attenuated as well.
