This is in reference to a point made by a poster in the '2009 Want List' thread regarding directional receiving antennae. Instead of adding it to the thread, I figured it to be somewhat a different subject.
In a quite random, accidental and primitive way a few winters ago during the night, I managed to null the far-louder CJBC Toronto completely, to ID the station detected nibbling at them way under -- WAMO Pittsburgh. You know how it is ; you fiddle around with the bearing of a 4-foot accoustic loop and the GE Superadio's built-in stick right next to it and sometimes get some goofy lobe or null. In some fashion I nailed it exact. But I had little clue as to what I was doing other than arranging a huge null of Toronto and/or a nice lobe toward Pittsburgh.
I do know that long ago there was this 'LSCA' antenna -- iIrc, a Loop-Sense-Cardioid Array' -- put together by a DXer in Florida. It took an amplified 4-foot loop and mixed it with some form of destructive interference introduced by a longwire to achieve some form of one-directional reception. That's the way directional stations *broadcast*, correct? Mixing the phases and causing destructive and constructive interference?
And Beveridge (sp?) antennae can be awesome for that one-direction pursuit, of course.
But for those of us with limited property, I ask if anyone has had experience with the LSCA or maybe has fashioned a more compact model for AM. Say a plain 4-foot unamplified loop and a longwire maybe 50 feet long and with little soldering. It'd be like the antenna that the DXer from Florida built, but with less electronics.
I've been out of the AM DX mainstream for a while. Like twenty years. Has someone come up with a relatively compact/inexpensive setup that achieves that one-direction reception in a form that would make rudimentary sense as to what we electronically-challenged are really doing?
As I said, my system here was crude and hit-and-miss, but it was also a small and compact system that for some reason worked. Obviously, I had opened this reception window to Pittsburgh while at the same time probably dimming the lights in the CJBC studios. From my den, those two places are not at right angles. And since skywave is also a factor, the reception process becomes three dimensional instead of just two.
Ideally, since a compass is magnetic, the little setup might include a visual compass, much like you would use the bearing on the base box of a rotating TV aerial. Wheee!
In a quite random, accidental and primitive way a few winters ago during the night, I managed to null the far-louder CJBC Toronto completely, to ID the station detected nibbling at them way under -- WAMO Pittsburgh. You know how it is ; you fiddle around with the bearing of a 4-foot accoustic loop and the GE Superadio's built-in stick right next to it and sometimes get some goofy lobe or null. In some fashion I nailed it exact. But I had little clue as to what I was doing other than arranging a huge null of Toronto and/or a nice lobe toward Pittsburgh.
I do know that long ago there was this 'LSCA' antenna -- iIrc, a Loop-Sense-Cardioid Array' -- put together by a DXer in Florida. It took an amplified 4-foot loop and mixed it with some form of destructive interference introduced by a longwire to achieve some form of one-directional reception. That's the way directional stations *broadcast*, correct? Mixing the phases and causing destructive and constructive interference?
And Beveridge (sp?) antennae can be awesome for that one-direction pursuit, of course.
But for those of us with limited property, I ask if anyone has had experience with the LSCA or maybe has fashioned a more compact model for AM. Say a plain 4-foot unamplified loop and a longwire maybe 50 feet long and with little soldering. It'd be like the antenna that the DXer from Florida built, but with less electronics.
I've been out of the AM DX mainstream for a while. Like twenty years. Has someone come up with a relatively compact/inexpensive setup that achieves that one-direction reception in a form that would make rudimentary sense as to what we electronically-challenged are really doing?
As I said, my system here was crude and hit-and-miss, but it was also a small and compact system that for some reason worked. Obviously, I had opened this reception window to Pittsburgh while at the same time probably dimming the lights in the CJBC studios. From my den, those two places are not at right angles. And since skywave is also a factor, the reception process becomes three dimensional instead of just two.
Ideally, since a compass is magnetic, the little setup might include a visual compass, much like you would use the bearing on the base box of a rotating TV aerial. Wheee!