Your Beloved Present and Past Antennae

[Steve Green NEPA]

(Thx for the suggestion, CADXER!)

Present :
A) 45 foot longwire, with 14-gauge wire. I think. All I see is a '14' on the spool. It's pretty thick.
2) A four foot accoustic loop. Same gauge wire. I goofed and made it fully four feet rather than
remember that the old NRC loop has something like 44 inch sides. So it doesn't tune the whole dial.

With the loop on the floor one night, and the GE SR II sitting on it, I managed to do a wicked, cardioid-ish null of nighttime regular CJBC 860 and ID WAMO Pittsburgh in the clear, albeit faint.

* * * * * * *

Past, pre-owned ones:
1) A L/W about maybe 50 feet, from my bedroom to a pole on the back of the garage. I hardly ever used it because of
B) The first Loop I ever made. It was the NRC special. With that I used to arrange for wicked nulls of most local and semi-local AMers, me tilting it to and fro and leaning it against a chair for final azimuthing effect.
3) I don't count the 'Wavemagnet' antenna built in to the back of the Zenith console. I didn't know you actually could rotate it without moving the whole radio and waking up the house at 3:45 AM.
4) I had a big, long desk in the room. It was actually a workbench my Dad brought home from work. Around its edges was some sort of aluminum trim. One midday I casually touched the Zenith's antenna lead to the trim.
See, at that point, I had taken out the Zenith radio section from the console and moved it upstairs from the basement.
Well, the connection nulled out all south NJ and Philly stations on frequencies shared with Connecticut .... 690, 800,
860, 1340, 1450, 1490, et al. Those stations were GONE!
5) One night I decided to get gay and connect that Zenith antenna lead to the metal crescent on one of those old rotary phone dials. The dial instantly became noisy and full of chirps and whistles, but I did ID one new station:
WBOS Boston, 1600.
The thing is, local WWRL was on at the time. And the two stations were MIXING. I was concerned that I might've damaged something in the radio, so I never tried that again.

 

[cyberdad]

In my case, they weren't so much antennae per se, but rather things I used as antennas that worked very well.

I've previously mentioned the piece of copper screen that I used as a teenager with my grandparents' vintage Zenith console. Fast forward to college in Iowa, During my freshman year in college, I was on the top floor of a three-story dorm. I positioned my Hallicrafters S-120 directly beneath a steel beam on the ceiling with fantastic results. By my senior year, I was sharing an apartment with three other guys on the second floor apartment in a wooden frame house. As I also posted recently, I used a water pipe in the kitchen as a place to position one of my roomate's cheap GE table radio for what suddenly sounded like city-grade signals from WIRL and other distant stations by day (KXOK, WHB, WLS, KIOA, KSTT) and the skywave blasters by night (WABC, KAAY, KOMA, XERF).

 

[gr8oldies]

I've not had the property to put up the equivelant of Radio Free Europe in my backyard, but I've udes 40 and 80 meter dipoles as well as random wires. I took a tip from a book and strung up some very fine wire from an apartment and transmitted on 40 meters through a tuner. I got some contacts but it didn't last very long

 

[boombox4]

First "antenna" was the one foot wire that came with an old transistor multibander... which graduated to the metal struts on my desk lamp... which graduated to my first real antenna, a 60 ft. antenna that went from my bedroom window to a tree near the back fence line... which graduated to a 80-100 ft V-beam which really didn't act like one... which graduated to a 100 ft antenna that was my best one, which blew down in a stormin 2003 or 2004, which graduated to the SW antenna I have now, which is an indoor 25-30 ft wire.

On MW I built two spiral loops, a 1.5 footer and a 4 footer. The 4 footer pulled in a lot of DX with my boombox during the 80's (hence my nickname here, as I started seriously MW DXing with a boombox. After that went into storage (along with my DXing hobby) I used a Select-A-Tenna, Radio Shack loop, and then finally built a milk crate loop I use now and then.

 

[joebtsflk1]

5) One night I decided to get gay and connect that Zenith antenna lead to the metal crescent on one of those old rotary phone dials. The dial instantly became noisy and full of chirps and whistles, but I did ID one new station:
WBOS Boston, 1600.
The thing is, local WWRL was on at the time. And the two stations were MIXING. I was concerned that I might've damaged something in the radio, so I never tried that again.

Can't say that I had a favorite antenna for AM as most of my DXing was FM, but I do remember trying to listen to a program one Sunday evening in the 70s...seems like it was Drake-Chenault's History of Rock and Roll on KCRG Cedar Rapids, coincidently on 1600. It was getting close to sunset and I was on the southern fringes of 1600's usual coverage. Playing with my first radio, a five dollar RCA transistor pocket radio, I discovered that amazing reception could be had by standing next to the telephone cable that came down the pole to where it started its underground run to the house. Good ol' mutual inductance. It wasn't a substitute for one of those old AM loops from Edmund Scientific...couldn't tune it, you'd look rather silly standing by a telephone pole next to the street, and the mosquito bite peaks tended to coincide with critical hours.

 

[CADXER]

For shortwave in the past I used random length of wire depending on the available space at different locations. Since mid-1990's after moving to my present location I use a Sloper Antenna made by Alpha-Delta Communications. This antenna also covers Medium Wave (AM), but for that band I prefer loop antennas. The longwires and the sloper antennas have served me quite well having heard well over 200 radio countries (per NASWA list) on shortwave.

For Medium Wave (AM) DXing I use loop antennas. Way back in 1980's I used custom made amplified loop called Kowalski Loop. It was made for me by a Milwaukee DXer Paul Kowalski whose hobby was experimenting and building loop antennas. After many years I replaced it with a Quantum QX Pro ferrite rod loop antenna made by Radio Plus. This antenna covers Medium Wave as well as Long Wave. I still use it today and I am quite happy with it.

For FM and TV DXing I used various Radio Shack rooftop antennas with a rotor, but I hardly DX on FM and TV these days.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

Back in the JFK Airport days, by buddy Vinny (yo! :- ) built a pivoting outdoor diamond loop on his garage. He operated it from inside with a rope-and-pulley. No animals were harmed throughout the diamond-loop's use.
IIrc, he put fixed capacitors at various stages into the beast's works. I forget the pre-tuned frequencies. Maybe the sequence was like the car radio default stages .... 600, 1400, etc.
You couldn't tilt it, of course, so there was no 'azimuthing' possible (or whatever that practice is called). But wow, did that monstrance COOK. One sunset and night a few of us heard just about every licensed 1580 station sign off and got KDAY Santa Monica at the tail end of the commotion.

Vinny also owned an Atwater-Kent radio, which didn't deter reception matters one bit. Still, that outdoor diamond loop was terrific.

 

[AudioRadiance]

Long ago I built a rhombic (OK a mini one) into the attic for FM for the directionality to try to filter out the local alternate channel station about 2m to the west that was crashing the party of the station I wanted 30m to the south. It worked. I think it was something like 27 feet on each leg.