Cantenna My Butt….

I love Alice, but sometimes her youthful exuberance keeps her from questioning things that she should otherwise view with a severely jaundiced eye –like the “Cantenna.” (See below.) It ain’t new. It aren’t even original. HeathKit made a “Cantenna” oil-filled dummy load for ham radio operators decades ago so they could tune their rigs without dirtying the bandwidth. I briefly held a ham license (KA2MKI, if I remember rightly) and the idea of a can-based antenna (as well as many other designs - shameless plug for the ARRL’s Antenna Handbook) has been around amateur radio for almost forever. Cheap as Scotsmen as they are, hams have typically home brewed their own cantennas with great success. (Have you CQ’d today?) I’m not saying that $20 is a bad deal, and I’m certainly not advocating oil-filled college dummies trying to steal WiFi service. It’s just a matter of adding some historical perspective in case next week someone comes out with a WiFi Yagi. 10-10. C-ya!