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but I thought NVIS sent most of the signal steeply upward anyway.
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NVIS is Near Vertical Incidence Skywave. Signals that are going up at very high angles, strongly reflected by the ionosphere back to earth.
Considering the ionosphere is 200~400 miles up, you see how steep of an angle you need to get reflection back to short distances.
Hopefully you know that NVIS is only possible on some of the lower frequency bands and is dependent on ionospheric conditions. Conditions are so poor some days that NVIS isn't possible on 40m during the daytime.
Maybe I'm just getting lucky with the propagation right now. I'm excited to see how far I can reach out once I get a shorter feedline of better quality coax,
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Won't make any difference.
100 feet of RG-8x is 0.9dB loss. 50 feet of LMR400 is 0.3dB... you will never be able to hear the difference in 0.6dB. Never.
and get an antenna up high in the air.
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In some cases the low antenna can actually be advantageous. They're very poor at low angle/long distance signal, which in the case of 40m in particular will tend to exclude foreign broadcasters and other sources of noise and interference.
The dipole is fine out in the front yard now, but for a permanent base antenna I'm leaning towards a EFHW. I just need to decide if I want to try to cover 80m or not.
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So-called EFWH's tend to be a lot noisier and more finicky. If you can put up a balanced antenna, I would recommend staying with them.