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Yeah, sort of. One of the more interesting things about radio is that everything is an "antenna" :-). When I got my amateur radio license I found in talking wit

Yeah, sort of. One of the more interesting things about radio is that everything is an "antenna" :-). When I got my amateur radio license I found in talking with other HAMs that there is a lot of "lore" and not nearly enough "science" in those discussions. The ARRL antenna book does a pretty good job of pulling out the basics from electrodynamics to the point where you can use simplified "rules" to build antennas to achieve various results. One of my favorite type of antenna is a "magnetic loop" because they are smaller and more easily portable.

AussieWog93 5y ago
>When I got my amateur radio license I found in talking with other HAMs that there is a lot of "lore" and not nearly enough "science" in those discussions. I was taught the same in my Electrical Engineering degree! Antenna design is apparently very much a black art, even at the professional level.
- myth2018 5y ago
  > I was taught the same in my Electrical Engineering degree! That's true. I'm not implying at all that in Engineering they do stuff the same way ham radios do, but sometimes we see Engineering building successfully upon certain phenomena, even though the comprehension of the underlying mechanisms is still evolving. A good example of that are the explanations for how an airplane wing works. It's been 20 years or so that the Coanda Effect is accepted as the explanation (afaik), but that didn't prevent engineers from building airplanes before that.
jacquesm 5y ago
You find this out the hard way when you design circuit boards for HF applications.
zikduruqe 5y ago
Many, many years ago when I was young, poor and a newly minted extra class operator (back when 20 WPM was the requirement), I had used electric fences, gutters, bed springs, file cabinets, etc... as HF antennas. Some did not work for crap, but others were surprisingly good. Anything and everything can be an antenna.
- ChuckMcM 5y ago
  Wow, hopefully you weren't transmitting! The harmonics and spurious signals from that sort of thing would be difficult to manage and stay in band.

AussieWog93 5y ago

>When I got my amateur radio license I found in talking with other HAMs that there is a lot of "lore" and not nearly enough "science" in those discussions. I was taught the same in my Electrical Engineering degree! Antenna design is apparently very much a black art, even at the professional level.

myth2018 5y ago
> I was taught the same in my Electrical Engineering degree! That's true. I'm not implying at all that in Engineering they do stuff the same way ham radios do, but sometimes we see Engineering building successfully upon certain phenomena, even though the comprehension of the underlying mechanisms is still evolving. A good example of that are the explanations for how an airplane wing works. It's been 20 years or so that the Coanda Effect is accepted as the explanation (afaik), but that didn't prevent engineers from building airplanes before that.

jacquesm 5y ago

You find this out the hard way when you design circuit boards for HF applications.

zikduruqe 5y ago

Many, many years ago when I was young, poor and a newly minted extra class operator (back when 20 WPM was the requirement), I had used electric fences, gutters, bed springs, file cabinets, etc... as HF antennas. Some did not work for crap, but others were surprisingly good. Anything and everything can be an antenna.

ChuckMcM 5y ago
Wow, hopefully you weren't transmitting! The harmonics and spurious signals from that sort of thing would be difficult to manage and stay in band.