In radio communications, the need to cut your coaxial cable into ½ or ¼ wave lengths in order to achieve best performance has been a long held belief in many circles.
This theory is challenged, however, by an online transmission line calculator developed by Kevin Schmidt (W9CF) which performs the task of determining ‘loss’ in dB based on a User’s custom field entries.
The applet’s fields include: cable type, frequency in MHz, cable length in feet or meters, load resistance and load reactance. Users then simply click the ‘calculate’ tab to discover what the loss will be.
Rather than cutting feedline into specific wave lengths, some simple calculations show that the least loss is actually created by the smallest run of feedline.
You can undertake your own tests by clicking HERE.
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