The Antenna Trick That Looks Like You Gave Up

Niche of One Creator Business Bundle — The Creator Business Bundle is the whole operating-system side of running a one-person shop: pricing, positioning, the boring parts nobody puts in the fun tutorial. Damn near all the business guides stacked into one file for $35, so you’re not buying them one at a time at full freight. Buy it once, quit paying for the same lesson six goddamn times.

A Brave New World of Friendslop — Games like Peak and R.E.P.O. outsold nearly everything with a real budget behind them last year, and Garbage Day’s read is that kids raised modding Minecraft don’t see a line between amateur and professional anymore. They just see games. Eighteen million downloads on a mod nobody paid to make, no marketing budget, no publisher behind it. Read past the gaming headline. It’s our whole argument, made by teenagers who never got the memo that you’re supposed to ask permission.

THE TIP. If the cell towers ever go quiet and you’re leaning on a handheld radio, here’s the trick nobody mentions until you’ve already burned a weekend yelling into static. Hang the antenna LOW.

Everybody mounts an HF wire as high as they can get it, which is exactly right if you’re trying to raise Portugal. You’re not. You’re trying to reach the next county, or the town on the far side of a ridge your repeater can’t see over, and for that you want NVIS. Near Vertical Incidence Skywave.

Ten to twenty-five feet off the dirt. The rule is a tenth to a quarter wavelength, so that height sits right for 40 meters and comes in low for 80, and every ham forum has fought over it for thirty years. Run it on 80 meters at night, 40 during the day. Done right the signal shoots almost straight up, smacks the ionosphere, and rains back down for fifty to three hundred miles in every direction. The whole sky is your repeater! No skip zone. No mountaintop box that might not even be standing anymore.

The military ran this exact trick for regional traffic back when a radio that couldn’t reach anybody got people killed. It still works, it’s a hundred feet of wire and some paracord, and it will outperform a five-hundred-dollar handheld the second the terrain gets ugly.

Nobody teaches this because it looks like you quit halfway up the pole. The guy who sold you the mast is never going to bring it up. He sells mast. Hams call a low wire a cloud warmer and they don’t mean it nice. Fine. Take the insult, get your traffic through, and let the poor bastard with the eighty-foot mast keep talking to Portugal. GZS Radio

Anybody in the field already running NVIS, reply and tell me what wire you’re using. I’ve got theories and not enough dirt to test them on. ~ J.D.