A rotator on 4 wheels...

What use is an F-call? As you might recall, I've been struggling to get an antenna installed on my car. It's been a process that started seven months ago, resulted in the purchase of four single band antennas and finally the purchase of an antenna tuner. I could spend hours discussing the things that were recommended, tried and tested, but I won't. It's a sorry tale that I'll share with you over a beer or six one day. On the first day that everything "worked", and I use the term loosely, since it's not been long enough yet to compare the performance of the antennas to my squid-pole solution and other antennas I've used over the years; on that first day I spoke to about six different stations scattered around me, at varying distance, from less than 5km away to 700km away. During that time I was parked up in front of a friends house and after a contact we'd position the car in a different direction to see what the impact of that change might be. Since this was my first contact with this setup, we kept the movement to the four directions of the compass, North, East, South and West. Generally speaking, there was a difference for some contacts, depending on which way the car was pointing. The difference could be as much as two S-points, that's 12dB difference, which is a big deal. You might recall that this is similar to the difference between an F-call using 10 Watts and a Standard Call using 100 Watts. Without actually measuring, since this was a rough-and-ready check, my car, with the antenna mounted on the boot has a better performance when the nose of the car is pointing at the remote station. Incidentally, the side and the rear seem to perform similarly, that is, there is no particular difference if the station is off the side or the rear. As I said, this is a rough-and-ready check. I'm going to do the same test several more times, and with the cooperation of a friendly remote station, hopefully add some data points between the four directions of the wind, because it's likely that there are weird artifacts that distort the radiation pattern and it might just be that if you point the car to the north-east, you get another s-point, thanks to the vagaries of the build of my particular car. In the end, I plan to log my direction, the S-point reading and with that I'll be able to draw the radiation pattern that my car represents and in turn I'll be able to use that to figure out which way to point when I'm working the grey-line or when I absolutely have to make a contact with a rare DX station. A mobile rotator on four wheels. I'm Onno VK6FLAB