Foundations of Amateur Radio

About ten minutes ago I was blissfully unaware of the existence of James K2MIJ. It's unclear if this bliss will ever be returned because it's obvious to me that James and I share several things, a sense of humour among them. Mind you, I've not yet actually spoken to James, other than me saying "Hello" right now, but his QRZ page is a thing of wonder.

Last week I was talking about weird and wonderful antennas. As you know, Amateur Radios don't particularly care what you plug into the back, as long as it looks like a 50 Ohm load, the vast majority of transceivers will happily transmit into them. I've heard of people making contacts with dummy loads, bits of wet string, chairs and as I said last week, bridges and rail-road tracks.

James has made it his mission to tune up strange things. He's made a lawn chair dipole and is using it to contact all states across the US, with only 5 Watts. He's added more countries to his DXCC than I have - 53 - and while he's at it, he also made some other contraptions, a fork dipole, from two actual kitchen forks, his in-the-shack dipole and his latest contraptions, a collection of five and a half inch and nine inch antennas. You heard that right, a five and a half inch antenna for 40 meters.

If you go to James' QRZ page, you'll find a kitchen table, holding an antenna farm that rivals those of many stations. Antennas for 40, 30, 20 and 17 meters.

One thing that piqued my curiosity is a photo of his 20m antenna sitting on the ground. Picture something like a peanut butter jar lid with a piece of copper stuck in the middle, standing up. It's wound around in a spiral with two windings, sort of like a big loading coil you'd find on a 2m vertical antenna.

The base of the contraption has about 30 or so windings on it which you connect between the copper and the feed-line.

The thing that got my interest was what was on the other side of the feed-line, a tape measure. More precisely, a steel tape measure.

As I said, I've not yet spoken to James, but it might be that his mini-antenna is mostly made of tape measure. Don't get me wrong, I think experimentation is wonderful and he's clearly made more contacts that I have, but I'd love to learn what effect the tape measure has on his contraptions.

I noticed a few other things that people have tuned up, beer cans, especially helpful with Fox Hunting, when one of your friends, or should I say Fiends, sets up a secret transmitter that you and several teams have to track down. The more devious the antenna installation, the better.

There's the quintessential flag-pole antenna for those times that your neighbours need to see that you're patriotic and not a nasty radio amateur with unsightly antennas that reduce the value of their home and remove the enjoyment of their life because your hobby affects their ability to sleep at night.

I've seen people tune up their gutters, even tried it myself - the noise floor in my shack prevents anything sensible, but I'm working on it - and of course there's the proverbial boat on a trailer antenna. No interest in sailing as such, just a nice tall aluminium construction that could perhaps be connected via some feed-line to a nearby radio transmitter. It's not even a permanent structure, so it'll add value to the neighbourhood.

Making a weird and wonderful antenna as an experiment is great for learning, it's great for experimentation and dealing with emergencies and it might keep your neighbourhood happy too - mind you, why anyone would think that an antenna is ugly is beyond me.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB