Just saw your post Tin Can & herbman, glad to see there are still a FEW guys left.
I don't mind having 35 out of 40 channels to myself, but it does get boring and 19 is not what it used to be.
I am on Ch.8 AM for skip and stuff, but if you call me on 19 you will hear me for sure. I am just north of the city, less than ideal location but that has not been a problem yet. Well, the 100kv hydro lines are not helpful but I am far enough away that they don't effect the CB band.
You can also hit me on SSB, anything from 35 up works; just hit me on AM first.
I have been itching to go up the CN tower with all my radio crap. From experience though portables SUCK if you are not standing on a real ground, I have yet to figure it out totally but a buddy who has some crazy antenna test gear basically mapped the RF field around my body on the 9th floor of a concrete building. Let's just say, weird things happen to waves that big in buildings without a proper ground, I was on a balcony too!
In two of the tests we head 75% of the radiation coming out of my HEAD and beaming almost vertically up through the building rather than towards the horizons. We think it has something to do with the water pipes and frame of the building, when I key up my body becomes part of the radiator and I turn the building into a radiator as well. That's all fine and dandy since everything is vertically polarized but something happens which should not, the energy lobes point towards space. That means somehow buildings directionalize these improperly grounded signals against the angle of polarization. Basically, what happens contradicts radio theory. We notice this same problem in just about all structures taller than 5 floors. This weird radiation stuff starts at about 40 MHz.
As soon as you put an antenna on a good ground (water pipes are the best) everything radiates as it should.
Anyway getting back to the CN tower, I want to go up there with a portable and Wilson 1000, head out on the observation deck and see if I can make some contacts. They cage off the whole deck, so you can't jump over the edge and actually fall, or throw stuff like money to the ground. The cage might block the radio waves
I would really like to get a small plane and put a nice vertical whip sticking out of the bottom. See how many people I could pick off from a few thousand feet, hahaha.
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