Want to put an spare conventional scanner to an interesting use, other than listening to locals?
VHF-Low band skip can be very interesting and when it opens, it is amazing. Thing is, unless the band opening is *extremely* good, you aren't likely to hear it on a rubber-duck - or at least very well or very long.
Believe it or not, make a quarter-wave vertical for 42 mhz and go to town.
Yikes - that's about 5.5 feet for the whip. (234/42=5.57 feet) What if you don't have 5.5 feet of overhead space? Run it as high as you can and bend the rest (no more than 90 degrees)
The "bent" vertical whip can now be considered an Inverted-L. Where you bend it is not exactly critical since the polarization can be a mixed-bag with skip.
Normally you don't want to do this for line-of-sight comms. However, with skip, the actual polarity can vary quite a bit from being vertical. In fact, you could just run this whip at an angle, or in some cases even just horizontally. I prefer the Inverted-L.
Operations: set up a search range from 30-54 mhz. Then lock out (or just ignore) the locals. If 6-meter amateur comms don't interest you, perhaps 30-49 mhz or so will do. Do not judge how the antenna performs based on reception of locals! You can go for weeks or in some cases months without hearing anything. But when you do, lookout! Some might even want to trigger a tape recorder, or other recording device. (Tape recorder - what's that?)
I never had the height to go hard core for low-band skip with a 11-foot vertical dipole or sloper. When I had the room, I did build a 2-wave bi-square and had a lot of fun with that - maybe later I'll get back into that.
So string up 5.5 feet of wire any way you can, lock out the locals, and go to town. It really is that easy. Purists will want to add a large groundplane or actually do a ground-mount.
Being in the clear is obviously a good idea, but since we're not talking about horizon-to-horizon comms, but venturing into HF territory with low-band skip, we can "bend" the typical rules a little bit.
VHF-Low band skip can be very interesting and when it opens, it is amazing. Thing is, unless the band opening is *extremely* good, you aren't likely to hear it on a rubber-duck - or at least very well or very long.
Believe it or not, make a quarter-wave vertical for 42 mhz and go to town.
Yikes - that's about 5.5 feet for the whip. (234/42=5.57 feet) What if you don't have 5.5 feet of overhead space? Run it as high as you can and bend the rest (no more than 90 degrees)
The "bent" vertical whip can now be considered an Inverted-L. Where you bend it is not exactly critical since the polarization can be a mixed-bag with skip.
Normally you don't want to do this for line-of-sight comms. However, with skip, the actual polarity can vary quite a bit from being vertical. In fact, you could just run this whip at an angle, or in some cases even just horizontally. I prefer the Inverted-L.
Operations: set up a search range from 30-54 mhz. Then lock out (or just ignore) the locals. If 6-meter amateur comms don't interest you, perhaps 30-49 mhz or so will do. Do not judge how the antenna performs based on reception of locals! You can go for weeks or in some cases months without hearing anything. But when you do, lookout! Some might even want to trigger a tape recorder, or other recording device. (Tape recorder - what's that?)
I never had the height to go hard core for low-band skip with a 11-foot vertical dipole or sloper. When I had the room, I did build a 2-wave bi-square and had a lot of fun with that - maybe later I'll get back into that.
So string up 5.5 feet of wire any way you can, lock out the locals, and go to town. It really is that easy. Purists will want to add a large groundplane or actually do a ground-mount.
Being in the clear is obviously a good idea, but since we're not talking about horizon-to-horizon comms, but venturing into HF territory with low-band skip, we can "bend" the typical rules a little bit.
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