[Elecraft] Is it my KX3/antenna or is it lousy band condx?

[Lynn W. Taylor, WB6UUT]

If you are end-feeding a wire, and it's near a half-wave on the band 
you're operating (let's say 32 3/4 feet, and 14.300 MHz) an end-fed wire 
is going to be close to infinite impedance, and you need some kind of 
Un-Un (9:1 being common) to step up from 50 ohms or thereabouts.

If you're trying to operate on the same frequency, and the wire is more 
like 48 feet, the impedance will be a whole lot lower and no transformer 
is indicated.

This is the myth of the "random" wire, and why one "random" wire works 
like gangbusters, and the next "random" wire is kinda lousy.

Antenna theory matters.

73 -- Lynn

On 8/13/2017 9:09 AM, Walter Underwood wrote:
> In July, five SOTA operators put up seven different antennas on a summit and compared their performance with WSPR. Six of the antennas were mostly within 3 dB of each other. The EARCHI antenna (end-fed with transformer) was  between 6 and 15 dB worse than the others. So in one experiment, the 9:1 transformer did not help.