I Only Use Compromised Antennas
Black Heather / M
$24.99
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Every ham knows that guy.
“My antenna is resonant.”
Excellent. At one frequency.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to actually do something with our radios.
The I Only Use Compromised Antennas shirt is for operators who understand that every antenna is a compromise:
- Size.
- Bandwidth.
- Efficiency.
- Radiation pattern.
- Height.
- Portability.
- Cost.
- Feed line.
- Installation.
- Wind loading.
- HOA tolerance.
- How much aluminum your spouse will let you bolt to the house.
“Resonant” isn’t a synonym for “good,” and it certainly isn’t a magic spell that makes every other engineering tradeoff disappear. A feedpoint can be resonant while the antenna is inefficient, inconvenient, narrowband, absurdly large, or radiating most of its useful energy somewhere you don’t need it.
The same guy lecturing you about the “compromises” in your loaded vertical may have spent forty years saving for a tower topped with a multi-band beam:
- thousands of dollars in tower, rotator, coax, grounding and hardware
- permanently pointed in exactly one direction at a time
- intentionally deaf off the back and sides
- impossible to toss in the truck
- useless for POTA
- hilariously inappropriate for SOTA
- difficult to move
- difficult to maintain
- and expensive enough that selling the house may involve its own demolition project
But your 8-foot coil-loaded whip is the compromise.
Right.
The correct antenna is the one that accomplishes the mission.
Wear this shirt to the hamfest. Wear it to Field Day. And wear it while listening politely as an OM explains, for the seventeenth time, that your antenna tuner doesn’t actually tune the antenna.
We know, Harold.
I ONLY USE COMPROMISED ANTENNAS
Because the antenna with no compromises is usually the one that never leaves the brochure.
I Only Use Compromised Antennas
$24.99
Reliable shipping
Flexible returns
“My antenna is resonant.”
Excellent. At one frequency.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to actually do something with our radios.
The I Only Use Compromised Antennas shirt is for operators who understand that every antenna is a compromise:
- Size.
- Bandwidth.
- Efficiency.
- Radiation pattern.
- Height.
- Portability.
- Cost.
- Feed line.
- Installation.
- Wind loading.
- HOA tolerance.
- How much aluminum your spouse will let you bolt to the house.
“Resonant” isn’t a synonym for “good,” and it certainly isn’t a magic spell that makes every other engineering tradeoff disappear. A feedpoint can be resonant while the antenna is inefficient, inconvenient, narrowband, absurdly large, or radiating most of its useful energy somewhere you don’t need it.
The same guy lecturing you about the “compromises” in your loaded vertical may have spent forty years saving for a tower topped with a multi-band beam:
- thousands of dollars in tower, rotator, coax, grounding and hardware
- permanently pointed in exactly one direction at a time
- intentionally deaf off the back and sides
- impossible to toss in the truck
- useless for POTA
- hilariously inappropriate for SOTA
- difficult to move
- difficult to maintain
- and expensive enough that selling the house may involve its own demolition project
But your 8-foot coil-loaded whip is the compromise.
Right.
The correct antenna is the one that accomplishes the mission.
Wear this shirt to the hamfest. Wear it to Field Day. And wear it while listening politely as an OM explains, for the seventeenth time, that your antenna tuner doesn’t actually tune the antenna.
We know, Harold.
I ONLY USE COMPROMISED ANTENNAS
Because the antenna with no compromises is usually the one that never leaves the brochure.