[BC] Skirt feeds.....and other such stuff

[Cowboy]

On Sunday 21 February 2010 08:59 am, Dave Dunsmoor wrote:

>      Yup, and I'd buy another whenever I run into you again. It's almost 
>      always useful to visit with someone who is willing to actually go out 
>      and try new ideas just to see what will REALLY happen.

 My standard answer whenever asked about my education is that 
 there is a *tremendous* amount of incinerated equipment in my past,
 most of it at my own expense.   ;)

>      I would not have  
>      thought to place a loop sideways along side a group of STL RF cables 
>      and expect to recover a usable MW signal....    

 That's an off-shoot of the time I tuned a building.

 There was only about 0.2 mv of noisy signal at the studio,
 so monitoring the AM was difficult.

 A building ( being a building ) has a very large diameter, so rather
 broad-banded, and occupying a fairly large amount of real estate *should*
 extract a fair amount of energy from a passing wave.
 Similar to what you saw, an almost unusable amount of RF energy was
 transformed to around 5 *volts* of input to the monitor.

 The monitor worked great ( with an attenuator ) until another "engineer"
 who just *knew* that was wrong, moved the pickup loop to the roof,
 where it "should" be. ( in his *educated* opinion )
 To the best of my knowledge, the monitor never worked again.

 That same trick that you saw/see has served me very well.
 That loop "antenna" is not the antenna at all, but merely
 the "loose coupler" loop from the real antenna to the monitor.
 ( and a good example where transmit and receive are not reciprocal )

-- 
Cowboy