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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • openhamprep explanation is wrong

    When you consider a segment of wire, it has some inductance and capacitance in that small segment, and the wider it is, the lower inductance and higher capacitance are. In other words, both X_L and X_C go down as diameter increases. Electric field lines within antenna are mostly perpendicular to wire everywhere except on ends, where they spread in all directions, which means that there’s some residual capacitance there that needs to be charged each cycle. This is called end effect and the wider wire is, the more of it you get. In fact, the same aspect ratio (length/diameter) gets you the same end effect ratio each time, and it’s usually in range of 0.98-0.95. If there’s insulation, then insulation has lower velocity of propagation as it has higher permittivity than air, and it is in place with highest electric field intensity, and this can also shorten necessary wire length a couple %. The more insulation there is, the more shortened antenna becomes. have a calculator: https://www.translatorscafe.com/unit-converter/en-US/calculator/dipole-antenna/

    But wait, there’s more. We can think of antenna as a lossy RLC resonator (sort of), where R is Rrad which for halfwave dipole would be 72 ohms, + loss resistance which is smaller, and neither are changing fast with frequency. What is changing faster is X_L and X_C, and the wider wire is, the smaller both of them are (X_L = -X_C at resonance), and this means that you can go further off frequency and still have acceptable SWR, i.e. antenna made with wider wire has more bandwidth, or if we look at it as resonator, lower Q. For HF this means using masts or wire cages instead of single wire, but for VHF this gets more practical

    Resistive part of antenna impedance near resonance depends on physical antenna length, and if antenna is shortened, then how it was done, but for the range we’re here it won’t change much. But also it will depend on height above ground, type of soil, antenna geometry and many other things. 72 ohm is in freespace only

    you can consider antenna wire as a transmission line, but it will need to include ground as the other side of transmission line, and then impedance is dependent on wire diameter to height over ground ratio. it’s not very useful except when considering very large and currently uncommon types of antennas (beverage antenna and rhombic antenna, both of which are traveling wave antennas)














  • i come from a bit flatter place and yeah farming used to be something done by about everyone as a side job, but while most of land around village, population 500, was also owned by about everyone, now 3/4 of it is owned by maybe 4 families who are actual, professional farmers who do actual, industrial farming. (this really kicked off when farmers could get loans for new machinery, and with EU money influx) other than another handful of people who work within village, and retirees, everyone else commutes to and works in bigger towns around, and some moved abroad entirely. this is how it looked in 00s, and from there it can go in two directions: when there’s not enough people around, all of these tiny shops in villages close and people eventually move out, or some people open other small businesses where they live and situation stabilizes sort of. but also independent from that, some people who get specialized degrees don’t come back but instead stay in cities where they got it, because there are no jobs they’re qualified for there. there are villages where places like hairdressers or various kinds of workshops open up and people stay and live there and there are villages where there are no births in entire year, because everyone under 30 moved out