He's in there wrapping wire around a stick. Proclaims he doesn't have enough and then goes and buys more wire. He goes out in the workshop and reappears with an aluminum cooking pot lid. Mumbles something about he's going to spray paint it black. Now I hear drilling sounds coming from his office. What could he be doing? Guesses anyone?
Given the time of year, I'm guessing "Halloween costume". Barring that, "homemade masturbation device".
I'm married to Seda, so I don't need a homemade masturbation device. I suppose what I'm making COULD be part of a Halloween costume.
Wrapping the wire around a stick most likely means he's either building an induction coil or a spring. One way or the other, I'm guessing the pot lid is going to be making some sudden moves.
It's a helically wound longwire shortwave antenna. The pot lid provides capacity hat termination to reduce pickup of local noise.
Interesting. I'd have thought that on a longwire antenna you needed it laid out (and oriented relative to the station you're trying to receive).
Ideally, you would. But a helical long wire, while not as sensitive, does a hell of a lot towards improving reception. Now what I need is an antenna tuner.
Interesting. In my limited experience with "field expedient" (actually not the ideal term, because they gave you better reception than the manufactured one) antennas, you cut your antenna specific to the frequency you were operating on. It was a pain in the ass and I sucked at it.
I *could* have left taps in every 50 or so turns and gotten a lot better performance, but this is a good first attempt. Now, if I were going to try to transmit with it, yah, I would've paid more attention to wire length and put a tuner on it as well, but as it is I've got a lot more reception inside the house than I did.
