Ideally, if you are going to transmit, you want a properly-tuned resonant antenna. But, sometimes, it isn’t practical. [Ham Radio Rookie] knew about random wire antennas but didn’t want a wire ...

For a given ham band its lower and upper band edge frequencies are converted by the famous 468/f to dipole lengths. QST, Oct 1926, "The Length of the Hertz Antenna" shows in line 2 of the table that a ...

You would construct a counterpoise antenna wire 11.5 inch for VHF, 6.5 for UHF and about 19.5 inches for an OK performing dual band VHF/UHF radio. Normally with a handheld radio the counterpoise ...