I am new to shortwave listening and just beginning to learn about antennas
I can build to enhance what I can pick up on my portable receiver. I
noticed an article on reducing the noise produced by an electric fence
(a.k.a. hot wire), and thought I'd let you know about an experiment I
tried. I'm sure it's quite naive, but I haven't seen anything like it on
the Internet yet.
I have horses, and to keep them off the fences we have a single strand of
aluminum wire running through plastic insulators nailed to the fence posts
about 5 feet off the ground. I became curious if this wire would act as an
antenna, so I unplugged the wire around a small half-acre square pasture. I
tuned into several shortwave frequencies and compared the whip antenna by
itself to the whip antenna alligator-clipped to the hot wire.
My radio has a signal strength meter with a scale of 0 to 5. The hot wire
boosted signal strength about 3 points. I'm looking forward to
experimenting further with time of day and the wire around a larger pasture.
Whatever the results, my wife is at least glad that the experiment is
putting off my need to erect a more standard outdoor antenna.
Michael Gehringer