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April 16th 04, 01:45 AM

- Sounds like a great antenna to me !!

Subject: Is this homemade antenna OK
From: "MC"
Date: 4/15/2004 7:22 PM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id:

I'm picking up AFN on their Puerto Rico freq. of 7.507Mhz. Now this may not
seem a remarkable thing but I am in the South East of the UK. Again not
remarkable but being new to this Shortwave stuff, I have no idea what I have
done to enable me to pick up this station. Yesterday I purchased some
common "household" wire (not copper). As I live on the first floor, but
have full "sole" use of the garden I attached one end of the wire near to my
entrance door (18'/20' from the ground) and it slopes about 60' down to the
end fence panel at the bottom of the garden. I have then run the wire back
along the top of the fence about another 42' (I have measured by counting
the 6 foot fence panels) and about 4' from the ground. This gives a sort of
wedge shape wire antenna (as opposed to an inverted L).

I have attached the wire via home made insulators (made from pieces of
drilled 1" plastic pipe) at both ends and have attached the coax (TV grade)
directly to the wire at the end near my entrance door. This is then
attached to th "Li-Z" phono antenna socket at the back of my DX-394 (B
revision).

Bearing in mind that the ATN reception is not brilliant but listenable, does
my antenna sound as though it is OK or do ATN really broadcast from my
neighbours house and is therefore the antenna is crap

I have no antenna tuner or other equipment (wouldn't know how to use them
even if I did). What other things can I do to improve things, especially in
the lower 1-3Mhz where I get awful noise (I do not get a huge amount of
noise above this and the higher the freq the less noise I get).

Regards

MC