Xeigu G90 with mobile antenna - great testing plan - Not!

[paulears]

I've got an X90 which I quite like, but I'm not at all an active ham - so I bought this for occasional use, in a deli style case, with an antenna that would be able to be put on my van just for this activity. I got one of those big multi band verticals and a 3 magnet mount for the bottom.

I had a few contacts using the quad band antenna on the office, which has 10m, but it tuned up OK with the internal tuner. I read somewhere today was a contest day, so took the kit somewhere quiet, stuck the antenna up and found a band full of people yelling CQ contest. My cunning plan was that I could respond to CQ contest calls, get my callsign back, hand out a 5-9 015 report to everyone and get loads of contacts quickly on all bands where they were contesting.

My error was my puny 20W against the whole world yelling callsigns at full power. Not one response. I figured they'd hear me, but my error was forgetting that every release of the PTT generated loads of responses, all louder than me! Bums.

More responses on the inefficient office antenna rather than the big multi band. I sort of expected better. All in all a waste of two hours!

[ch25]

With low power you need aerial capable of radiating the most of it.
There we have shortened antenna surrogate, with low efficiency due to it's length, matching, coil loss and so on.
Most probably it was radiating no more than a few % of input power.
Chris

[paulears]

That does indeed seem the case. However, i figured the length of the damn thing is pretty big, so i assumed at lewst as good as a CB antenna on 28MHz. Low power output and poor antenna i suppose, but the band was full of strong signals i couldnt get back to!