Stuffing Content

I thought I would begin here by posting a couple of things I had written for myself as an exercise in learning how to include PDF’s and Doc files in a blog. One PDF that I am including went to the Novice Site and the other was a piece I wrote to use as a diary for a wonderful learning experience in my Ham Radio life. The Novice piece is a simple history of my early radio experiences. The second is an attempt to start my own “Popular Mechanics Magazine”. Perhaps I should explain that last remark. For years and years my father and I used to joke about how funny it was that certain magazines made a living reinventing the screw or a bolt month after month. Well, the second piece, “Reinventing the Dipole” is my attempt at understanding all the elements involved in designing and feeding a proper dipole. As in mechanical magazines published monthly, amateur magazines talk about the dipole quite often, hence my reference to “Mechanics Illustrated” or “Popular Mechanics”. Dipoles are one of Hamdom’s most popular and easiest to construct antennas and it is an easy project to do improperly. I never took the time to consider how using a dipole in non resonant modes would produce great losses, where those losses were and how to mitigate those losses. Done properly, a dipole is an effective radiator, a quiet receive antenna and can be used over multiple bands.