Long Wire Antenna Question

[sickpup]

I just picked up a Grundig G6 radio. I'm completely new to SW Radio lisening. It has an 1/8th inch mini jack port for an external antenna on side. I soldered on 50 to 100ft of 20 ga stranded wire to the center pin of plug and plugged it in. I seem to get a lot of static on some bands and on other bands it work good compared to the Telescoping antenna on the radio. The wire is ran from the radio to a window, a small hole routes the wire outside and onto the top of roof. The wire is just laying on roof. There is a over the air TV antenna mounted on chimny of house. My questions are

1) Does the length of the long wire antenna matter to which frequency band you are trying to recieve?

2) Would it be better to attach the wire to the TV antenna?

3) should I run a shielded wire in the house and then splice the long wire to the center of the sheilded wire outside the house, and splice the shield to a ground in the house say the center screw on a power outlet? Would that cleanup my reception?

4) Run a shielded wire al the way to tv antenna, run center to antenna and shield to grnd? would that be better then a Long wire?

I know it is a lot of questions... thanks for input.

 

[ka3jjz]

1. A true longwire - which is not what we have here - is indeed tuned to a specific frequency. But not in this case.

2. A TV antenna isn't really the best receiving antenna for HF, although it would work. A small portable like the G6 is likely to be overloaded

3. No- in fact the center screw of an AC outlet really should never be used for a radio ground. Better to attach the radio ground to a cold water pipe or a rod driven into the ground, and make the connection as short as possible. Long lengths to a ground can, under certain conditions, act as an antenna themselves, and that's something you want to avoid. To be completely correct, that ground needs to be connected per whatever the electrical code suggests, but most folks don't go that far...

4. Again, don't go overboard with putting too much antenna on the G6. It's already a fairly sensitive radio. It's very hard to diagnose where the noise is coming from - just about anything in the house can cause noise, and any flaky connections between the radio and antenna can also produce it. You could probably get away with 50-75 foot, seeing as you're on the West Coast but even that might overload it. I would experiment first with the longer lengths- get comfortable with what you are hearing - and if you are overloading, you'll know it soon enough. One of the easiest ways to diagnose it is if you are hearing broadcast stations where they're not supposed to be - for example, your local MW outlet is showing up in the 2-30 mhz area somewhere.

best regards..Mike

 

[7designs]

Agreed, I have tried a few long wires with my G6, it doesn't take much to overload it.