Joshua,
This is the beginning of a very long discussion, and one I'm still
studying after decades as a ham.
Ignoring the counterpoise for just a moment......
If your wire is 1/4 wave on some band, it will have a fairly low
impedance at the binding post connector and the KX3 tuner will tune it
just fine.
If your wire is some other length on the same band, there will be a
higher impedance at the feedpoint, and the KX3 will tune it just fine.
If your wire is 1/2 wave on that band, the impedance will be very high,
and the tuner likely won't tune it.
The reason you want to be aware of this is that a 1/4 wave on 20m will
be 1/2 wave on 10m.
I used to think that resonance was king, and the tuner made the antenna
resonant. I'm starting to actually believe that isn't true.
Something that is truly "random" will work on some bands, not on
others. There are charts that tell you how much wire to use so it is
not 1/2 wave on any useful ham band.
Alternately, you can just have a couple of different lengths of wire so
if you stumble on a half-wave length, you can switch to something ten or
fifteen feet longer or shorter.
73 -- Lynn
On 5/22/2014 4:52 PM, Joshua Gould wrote:
One of the things I'm looking at is the Stackable binding posts. The way I
read this is that I can just use a random length wire (provided that it is
a 1/4 wavelength on some band), hook it to the radio and just get on the
air...
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