[IRCA] More fun with wires

["Craig Healy" <bubba@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I got my reels of wire from eBay.  I now have a 900+ foot length of black
#14 THHN stranded, and a 425 foot length of the same wire in a brown color.

I rolled them out at the WDDZ-550 site this evening at dusk.  The longer
black wire was about due south, and the 425 footer was parallel and maybe
six feet away.  Both were connected to a home-built phaser and then onto the
Palstar R30CC in the truck.

One thing I noticed right off was that 550 was considerably easier to null
off the longer wire.  Probably because it is about a half wave at that
frequency, and broadside to the towers.  On non-directional day pattern it
was easy to bring 550 down so 540 and 560 were actually listenable.  On
night pattern, the noise really jumps up for some reason, even though the
power is only 500 watts.  But, having two point sources from two towers
makes nulling less effective.

By phasing I could switch from favoring north to favoring south.  I was more
interested in signal strength of known stations than seeing what I could dig
out.  Most of the NYC stations could be brought down considerably, though I
never could get a deep null on anything.  I may need some added phase shift
on one of the wires.  I was able to get some weak audio on the 1521 Saudi
even though the wires didn't favor that direction.  Also some Caribbean
sounding music on 1540.

I suppose the next thing is to drag it all out to New Bedford and see what
it does at the 1340 site.  There is also a local school athletic field that
would take the full length of wire, and that's not near any transmitters.

Craig Healy
Providence, RI

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