Thursday, November 18, 2010

G5RV compared with dipole using WSPR

It's hard to measure one antenna against another on HF due to the huge variations in conditions even minute by minute.

Recently I bought a half size G5RV multi-band (compromise) antenna and while it's incredibly convenient my feeling is that while reception is as good, people just don't hear me as well.

To test this, I used WSPR on 40m to record the S/N that people hear me with running 1W.

This graph plots 1 nightly cycle of transmission on the G5RV followed by two on the old 40m wire dipole.

wspr chart.png

Higher up the chart is better and there are outliers, but the average of reception seems markedly better on the simple dipole on average.

More samples need to be taken and my analysis needs to be better thought through.

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