About this episode

Onno shares his year-long experiment with a dummy load and its ability to absorb RF signals.

Foundations of Amateur Radio About a year ago I set upon a new adventure, to determine if the dummy load I own, traditionally seen as a device that doesn't emit any RF, to determine if it was in fact imbued with the ability to absorb RF, rather than share it around like an antenna might. At this point you might be shaking your head, but this wasn't embarked upon lightly. I had spent several years experimenting with lower and lower power levels and came to learn that even 10 mW can make it to the other side of the planet, 13,945 km away. In other words, extremely low power can, under the right conditions, make it across the globe. So, with that in mind I connected a dummy load to my WSPR beacon and configured it to transmit across each band between 80m and 10m and then set-up an RTL-SDR dongle to monitor those same bands as well as the remainder of the amateur bands within the range of the dongle. I did this because I wanted to make sure that if there was any chance of a harmonic appearing unexpectedly, there'd be a good chance I'd see it. Then for a year I did nothing. Well, not exactly, but we'll get to that. After downloading 16 months of WSPR reports I extracted all the…

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