uh listen I just wanted to give you a bit of advice on if you're a shortwave listener how
to improve your experience so I'm an antenna tenant my name's Callum by the way I'm an
antenna manufacturer this whole channel is about normally most of it's about antennas
a bit of a ham radio and advice and that sort of thing but listening to shortwave can be a
bit of a Minefield because very often I'm just looking at you know I've got the internet here
very often you've got this little telescopic uh poll that they expect you to listen to shortwave
and sometimes you're going to find that it's not very efficient so I'm going to give you some ideas
if you're prepared to go out into the backyard into the back Garden of what you can do and what
difference substantial difference you can make sometimes now in the main the height of an antenna
dictates how well it's going to transmit and to an exact extent how well it's going to receive but
you'll if you are in a built up area you'll find that quite often you will hear lots of
buzzing and clicks and pops and what we call qrn man-made interference a man-made interference we
can not eliminate but we can reduce the impact of our man-made interference by putting our
antenna quite low to the ground so I'm going to give you three ideas all right depending on the
um radio you've got now some radios at the back will just have a maybe a screw terminal
or something else and it might say antenna and the idea for that is you can put some sort of long
wire out in the in the garden sometimes it's got what they call a 3.5 mil Jack and I'm just looking
on Amazon here there's a little 3.5 mil Jack with some connectors on the top which will come in
handy in a minute and other times you might have something called a BNC connector or some sort of
different connector all right depending on your shortwave radio now if it's a single screw thread
and it just says antenna these are probably very own radios hopefully I'm looking for two all right
because just like any electrical circuit it's got no material like a battery's got a positive and
a negative isn't it two's going to be better and I'll show you in a minute a three and a half mil
uh Jack again if we look at the picture here we've got two we've got the Earth which is generally the
tip I think and then or is it the other way around but it doesn't matter for our
purposes one is one is positive one is negative if you like so that's good that's good and a BNC
connector and I'll show you what that looks like it might look something a bit like this all right
BNC I don't know other styles but in the main you'll be able to work it out from the user guide
or whatever else what other connector you've got but effectively what we're after
we're after a positive and a negative and it doesn't matter which way out it is so there's a
couple of antennas that we can make the first one and I'll just draw some sort of random you know
backyard okay is we can get a piece of coaxial cable coax coax coax and we can connect our coax
to directly to our little thing oh there's one there as well look so what we do is when we strip
back the coax okay the coax cable will have a center conductor and then it's got this braid
on the outside and then the slightly bigger jacket because we've stripped it back and
that's okay it's like old TV cable isn't it all right it's coaxial cable so what we want
to do in all these circumstances is connect the tip to one side and a braid to the other side
all right you can just piggybacks and bits of wire onto that and whatever and you'll find it
just don't short the two out right they need to be separate again at the other end we've got our
coax to our antenna and what we're going to do is we're going to connect one to one place and
we can connect the braid to the other and you can not tape it up and put a bit of Vaseline on
it or something to stop water getting in the coax that's what we don't want to do
so what antenna ideas can I give to you I would look at a if you've got some sort of random back
up Backyard you can take a piece of wire any any wire any wire some old ethernet cables
some telephone wire you've got knocking around any wire cheap you can buy like 330 feet or 100
meters of wire from a local very often they call it equipment wire equipment wire so what
we're going to do is I'm going to take this bit or this bit here right the other end of this and
we'll just make a little Notch just to say it's here that could be anywhere and we could just run
this wire on the ground around the flower beds and the vegetables and whatever else and connect
it back up to here so effectively that's become a loop we've connected one side of the loop to here
and the other side of the loop to there and you'll find that will be a generally Pleasant broadbanded
um antenna that you can listen to quite successfully so your coax
comes back to your radio now I could go all advanced on you and you could
we could talk about putting chokes on the line and Transformers and everything else
you don't need to okay you're just filling around trying to get that station you know radio Albania
or whatever it is all right so you've got your loop on the ground you can do the same thing and
lift it off the ground okay so we can have it at zero literally on the ground then we can lift it
up and you can lift it up as high as you want the higher you lift it up the more interference you
might hear from around about plasma TVs and all sorts of stuff hello I'll be with you in a moment
so these are not cool I'll make a list here it's a one Loop
and then we've got low and high if you like now I've got I've got two of these uh I've
got one very low to the ground a big one it's 90 meters 300 20 so that's about 300 feet and that's
about one foot 30 centimeters above the ground and that was a good good experiment and in the
main it works quite well I've also got another one that's much smaller very small only 15 feet square
it's about three or four meters literally on the ground that's very successful down at five six
seven eight nine megahertz by the way that little one but they're both about the same bit of coax
I mean I've got little Transformers and stuff but to get going it's a work okay so there's a pair of
loops and the other one I'd recommend that you're looking at is just a long dipole best you can
so everybody's backyard Back Garden is going to be different all right but effectively if you have
you split it one side of the coax to there and the other side to there you could have a dipole
which is the two elements the one of the positive and the negative if you like and to be frank with
you if you're doing shortwave listing it doesn't matter if that one's a bit shorter and this one's
a bit longer all right and again it doesn't matter how high or low it is because for the shortwave
bands under like a quarter of a wavelength which is the enormous height for you know down at seven
eight nine ten megahertz it won't matter it will almost be omnidirectional and it doesn't matter
if you come along and go up there and down by the garden shed and this one comes along here and goes
to a tree all right it doesn't matter at all so a little bit of coax is again back to your radio
so that's kind of dipole shape if you like and that's loot shape at a push if you have
only got a single terminal then we can do the same but don't connect it back to here
so connect your the center of the coax to here and the center of your coax to one side of this
so we'll you connect the center of your coax to here and a bit of coax to one
side of this but don't connect it all the way back you can go around and then stop
all right so it starts there goes all the way around and stop it before it gets the back all
right just a nice sort of an open loop and in fact depending on how far your little radio
was from here you could probably just take a piece of wire all right out the back of your
little radio around the garden around the fence and yes stop it here somewhere and you'll find
there'll be more signal strength using one of those little telescopic whips so that's the
two ideas I'd give you all three ideas actually we've got the loop we've got the very small Loop
we've got a loop on the ground Loop maybe at fence height or around a couple of trees bear
in mind when the wind blows the trees move yeah why I can snap or just this business of taking
accounts to some sort of weird shaped dipole all right and then you want to do a bit of shortwave
listing maybe around the amateur bands or whatever I think you'll find this will surprise you there's
a little Transformer in here called a loop on the ground Transformer l-o-g is not quite sure what
we're doing at the moment all right Django do you want to come and plug the loop on the ground in
you could buy one of those and it will um it's got some transformation properties all right
something to do with impedance and it'll give you a radio a better match bananas and bananas
all right together slightly better match you'll be able to hear better basically I use one of these
with the loop on the ground thing on the 40 meter band all the time it's fantastic on 40 meters
which is around seven megahertz so if you're between sort of five and ten megahertz a little
loop on the ground will work great works great all the way down but on your average radio your little
you know Grundy or whatever you've got might not quite have to punch the gain we're after for a
very small Loop you might need a bigger Loop for that there we are shortwave listening have a good
time that's my ideas and hopefully won't cost you a penny all right do I have any other videos in
stock about shortwave listening no so you're gonna have to take a random one for here and I've got a
playlist down here that amateur radio operators might enjoy uh in the meantime enjoy your radio
have a good fun thanks for tuning in today I'll bid you farewell all the rest for now bye foreign
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