Small Changes can have a Big Effect

What use is an F-call? Yesterday I learned an interesting lesson. It wasn't a simple lesson to learn, but I'm guessing it's going to take me some years to come to grips with what I experienced. Said plainly, "Small Changes can have a Big Effect" That's pretty straight forward as a lesson, but when you actually experience it head on, it tends to make more impact. As you've heard in the past, I operate my radio mostly from my car. I recently purchased some antennas that I want to mount on my car and want to use without an antenna tuner. Don't get me wrong, my antenna coupling unit has done some amazing things. It continues to work well with my 12m squid pole and I'll continue to take it with me when I go camping. With a friend and fellow amateur we spent most of yesterday fiddling with my antennas on my car. I have to say, doing this with someone else makes life a lot better. You can bounce ideas off each other, prod the other into action with a calculator, argue about the merits of your idea and figure out what's going on. In my experience, nothing beats having someone with you to figure stuff out. Originally I mounted my antenna on the center of my boot lid, between the front of the boot and the back window. I set the mount to be parallel with the boot, about a 4 degree angle. So, one of the silly ideas we had, and really the credit goes to my friend Allen VK6XL, was to make my mount more vertical. I looked at him, he looked at me, I shook my head and called him silly names. We were getting all manner of responses from the antenna analyzer and nothing made sense. I undid the bolt and adjusted the angle by less than 4 degrees. When you look at it from the side, the antenna started with a slight lean, now it was standing straight up. All of a sudden the recalcitrant antenna started playing ball. It was finally resonant within the band and finally had an SWR that wasn't embarrassing. I am still working through what I saw, capacitance between the antenna and the car, between the antenna and the ground, between the various parts of the car, but somehow this minute change made all the difference. Suffice to say, I owe Allen a beer. I'm Onno VK6FLAB