Posted: 2/3/2011 12:56:02 PM EDT
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This cartoon reminds me of a story I read about several years ago, I think it was in QST or maybe CQ.
There used to be a VOA shortwave broadcast site north of Cincinnati. When it was decommissioned, some local amateurs had the opportunity to operate using the giant dipole curtain antenna arrays, before the antennas themselves started being disassembled. The comments were interesting... one guy said one evening he thought the bands were completely dead but went in anyway to give it a try. To his amazement, he said he was a "fly on the wall" listening to stations all over Europe on 20m. He started working people who were very surprised and said they had no other contacts with North America. They were even more surprised when he said he was only running 100w, but he did tell them he had a "pretty good" antenna. IIRC they weren't allowed to announce where they were operating from until it was over. |
| I would eat worms to transmit on a big commercial array. There is a pretty big discone south of Tucson that is available for amateur use, but I'm not going to eat worms for it.Titan discone |
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I had the idea to try to find a retiring channel 2 television station right after the analog cutoff and see if I could work some 6 meters on their antenna. I didn't pursue it, I didn't figure that any broadcaster would let some hams into their transmitting facilities.
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im not far form the KVLY tower, actually my QRZ profile picture is me at the base of it. I would love to run a full wave 160m wire up that thing.... 5/8 is the longest element length you'd want to run, otherwise the radiation pattern would skew upwards away from the horizon. Rough calculation shows a 5/8 wave for 1.900 would be 321 feet. For more gain, you have to use some kind of phasing in order to stack in-phase elements vertically. |
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Now THIS is the antenna/s I want to connect to!!
http://images.nrao.edu/images/vla09_1_med.jpg AND it's only about 2-21/2 hours from the house!!! Sarge |
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Now THIS is the antenna/s I want to connect to!! http://images.nrao.edu/images/vla09_1_med.jpg AND it's only about 2-21/2 hours from the house!!! Sarge Years ago as a young fighter pilot, I flew a low level that went right by the VLA. From the air at low level it is VERY IMPRESSIVE. |
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Quoted: Now THIS is the antenna/s I want to connect to!! http://images.nrao.edu/images/vla09_1_med.jpg AND it's only about 2-21/2 hours from the house!!! Sarge somehow I don't think there is a coax cable for you to just plug into your radio... |
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Now THIS is the antenna/s I want to connect to!! http://images.nrao.edu/images/vla09_1_med.jpg AND it's only about 2-21/2 hours from the house!!! Sarge somehow I don't think there is a coax cable for you to just plug into your radio... Of course not. It uses ladder line. 
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Now THIS is the antenna/s I want to connect to!! http://images.nrao.edu/images/vla09_1_med.jpg AND it's only about 2-21/2 hours from the house!!! Sarge Just one of those would make an impressive antenna for EME work... something similar has been done before (VE3ONT). Trying to work out the phasing to use multiple dishes on transmit would be a huge undertaking... for RX its almost certainly just left to DSP. IIRC the VE3ONT operation could hear their own echoes from the moon with something like 1/2 watt TX on 1296. 52dB gain antenna does tend to improve communications capability. |
