Got to wonder about the RF animal ...

Just a little FYI, you can use anything as an antenna.

There is going to be a QSO party for light bulb antenna users.

The Lightbulb QSO Party

There are pages that go into detail how to make one.

So far N1DAY (one of the sponsors of the QSO party) using a light bulb talked 4,200 mile to someone in Germany.

This past week my son made me one, he put it out in the yard and I have been using it since Wednesday.

SSB on 40M, I was talking to a couple people in Canada about 100 miles away and one in Ohio. While using FT-8 (digital) I reached 300 miles. The "radio" is a poorly built DDC sdr with 50 watts out. I am going to try it out with 10m later on this weekend with one of my drivers.

 

When I get a chance, I will go out and take a couple pictures of it, but it really looks like this -

 

Yeah what the guy did in the picture was to use a remote antenna tuner, with a loading coil that has taps for different bands.

The coax itself was part of the antenna in his original design but if you read about the antenna on the blog, he explains how he eliminated the coax.

He used it looks like 3 inch pipe while I had 5 inch laying around and the kid calculated the number of turns needed for the loading coil for 40m. I am using a lamp from the 1920's I had in my collection and have a really long lamp that I will try out later on. I didn't paint mine, he did.

FT-8 is an interesting mode, it really is not for qso's but rather just "radio checks" and some of the distances are amazing with it and 2 or 3 watts. I am using about 5 now.

 

Well I have used a wire out the window, talked to Australia and Japan with it, I've used the bat antenna (shaped like a bat) and talked to Europe a bit, I have a cross loop magnetic antenna which I used for a while and have a receiving version of that I want to put up.I still have an underground antenna in place and that preformes a bit less than my old dipole at the other place I lived that was 20 feet in the air, and the most bizarre antenna was my cookie baking sheet antenna that used two cookie sheets spaced out by 4 or 5 inches and was tuned by a variable cap. I put it on a four inch pvc pipe 15 feet in the air and it worked well enough that I could check into a 40 meter net in the morning almost every day. The wind caught that and one of the sheets ended up in a tree.