Santa managed to include in his delivery some of the materials that I needed to build my 160 meter inverted L antenna. You see, Steve Silverman, Pete Juliano and I have collectively more than 150 years in ham radio, but none of us have ever operated on Top Band. The three of us have taken A SOLEMN OATH to correct this horrendous deficiency. I am in the vanguard, partly due to a weather pattern that is perfect for antenna building. <\/b>
<\/b> Armed with a new elastic band for my Wrist-Rocket sling shot and some perfectly shaped lead sinkers, yesterday — with the obvious cooperation of The Radio Gods — I managed to get two ropes over some 70 foot trees. Soon — with minimal gnashing of teeth — I had 185 feet of wire in the air. <\/b>
<\/b> This morning I was messing around with L networks at the base of the antenna. I took a coffee break, leaving the 185 foot wire and the ground system connected to the coax. I had the transmitter off, so I was surprised to see the SWR meter jumping around a bit, up significantly from zero. What could that be? It wasn’t coming from my station, so it had to be coming from some other transmitter. And the slight bit of jumping that I saw on the SWR meter had the familiar pattern of the human voice. Some radio sleuthing ensued. <\/b>
<\/b> I flipped the station antenna switch to the “bench” position, and connected my scope to the coax. Wow! I immediately saw a big strong AM signal with modulation, at about 5 or 6 volts peak to peak. The Rigol ‘scope gave the frequency: 1220 kHz. <\/b>
<\/b> I tuned the HQ-100 to that frequency. As I listened to Gospel broadcast, I could follow the voice peaks on the ‘scope. <\/b>
<\/b> Some Googling ID’s the station: WFAX 1220 AM. 5 kilowatts in the daytime. 1.5 miles from my house. The vertical portion of the inverted L is obviously picking up a LOT of energy from the WFAX tower. And the horizontal portion of my antenna is broadside to the WFAX tower. <\/b>
<\/b> Of course this all made me think about throwing together a crystal radio, but then I realized I’d already listened to WFAX with simple diode — the one in my SWR meter. That little SWR meter was acting like a crystal radio with a visual output!<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Santa managed to include in his delivery some of the materials that I needed to build my 160 meter inverted L antenna. You see, Steve Silverman, Pete Juliano and I have collectively more than 150 years in ham radio, but none of us have ever operated on Top Band. The three of us have taken … Continue reading ““Receiver Here is My SWR meter OM…””<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259,130,69,108,41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9612","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-160-meters","category-am","category-antennas","category-crystal-radio","category-juliano-pete"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9612","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9612"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9612\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9612"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9612"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.homebrewradio.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9612"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}