Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio The other day a friend of mine asked a really silly question. How come when I point my YAGI at a direction for a station using the great circle, the signal is there but weak, but when I point it in a different direction, say 20 degrees away from the great circle, the signal improves? Being a good little Amateur, I responded with the logical explanation. Well, two things come to mind, one being that you're not pointing where you think you're pointing, that is, North on your antenna isn't North in reality, so when you point at the other station, it's not actually where you're pointing, and when you adjust, the antenna ends up in the correct direction. Another explanation I came up with is that the pattern of their YAGI isn't what they expect. There might be local factors that influence the pattern, putting weird distortions into their foot-print and making for "interesting" nulls where there should be signal, and vice-versa. That in turn started a whole conversation about dire