[IRCA] New Flag Antenna results

["Jim Renfrew" <jrenfrew@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jim Renfrew, Holley NY

Some of you who attended the NRC convention heard Neil Kazaross' workshop on 
flag antennas.  With his guidance I've built one.  Using three trees in a 
line, aimed NE/SW I put up the Flag in the front yard, with the lower wire 8 
feet off the ground, and the upper wire 25 feet.  I couldn't get any higher 
with the 40 foot ladder, two trees were too narrow to support the ladder at 
that height, and the third tree was a mess of branches.  If necessary I can 
drop the lower wire to ground level after the lawn-mowing seaason, or even 
put it under ground with a conduit.  The length of the antenna is about 85 
feet.  Neil provided a 9:1 transformer.  There is a 475 ohm resister at the 
far bottom corner.  There is a 125 foot coax into the house, but there 
doesn't seem to be appreciable signal loss.   I use a Drake R8B.  Other 
wires are a south wire (200 feet), an east/west wire (700 feet), and a 
northeast wire (about 600-700 feet).  Flag results are very positive.  Most 
of these receptions are not found with the northeast longwire (or 
substantially weaker), but present with the Flag.  Stations to the 
southwest, like WLW, WSB, WHAS, or WTAM, are depressed about 15-30 dB using 
the Flag.

Here's what I've noted tonight, times EDT:

2229    774    Koranic reading, faded before I could get a Global Tuners 
receiver to try to match it.  Egypt likely.
2243    1089    UK excellent
2244    1341    Weak audio, North Ireland likely
2250    1377    France, very good
2251    1521    Audio in heavy WWKB slop, Saudi I suppose
2252    549    Arabic, something here but language may be wishful thinking. 
Algeria and Germany have been heard here.
2253    693    BBC very good
2254    738    Spain, fair, enough to ID language
2255    747    Netherlands    "I Can hear Music", appropriately
2256    855    Spain // 738
2246    1053    UK I guess, but too weak to ID or to compare with 1089.
2308    1060    CKMX Calgary - matches web audio and song list.  Blasting 
KYW on all antennas.  Fades in and out.
2316    1134    Croatia now off at this late hour, but a het is noted.
2318    1215    Absolute Radio

Yesterday at 1915 I had an interesting signal on 783 kHz, might have been 
Mauritania or Syria.  I couldn't make it match the Mauritania shortwave 
station, and I couldn't find a web audio for Syria that worked.  It was not 
Barcelona, Portrugal or Germany.  I think this was Syria, heard last year in 
December.

I'm disappointed to note that more than a few Global Tuners receivers are no 
longer listed.

Thanks to Neil and Chris Black for the guidance on putting this together.

Bruce, I'm sorry that this isn't in the form needed for IDXD, but perhaps 
you can make this into a feature after the regular reports.  People who 
attended the convention will be interested in this.  More than a few people 
have expressed an interest or intion to build one fo these. 

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