Foundations Of Amateur Radio

Foundations of Amateur Radio What's in a word? When you join a new community you learn very quickly that each community has its own language. A word in one community has a different or extra meaning in another. For example, the word "Snowflake" in one community might refer to a phenomenon related to water and freezing, in another community it refers to a person who is sensitive, easily hurt and offended. If you mix the two meanings all manner of misunderstanding ensues. In amateur radio, one of those words is the word gain. This word is used in many different aspects of our hobby, but today I'm going to focus on one specific use of it, in relation to antennas, antenna gain. This mythical property of an antenna is often used as a way to distinguish two different antennas and in advertising terms, bigger is better, more gain, more better. I'll skip over the marketing shenanigans related to artificially making the number larger by comparing apples and pears, or dBi and dBd and move on to how gain comes abou