Playing around I put two diodes inline with my antenna before the receiver. Attenuated the signal. But seemed like it did better than the rf gain with the signal to noise ratio. Is it? Or did I just imagine that it did? Or is it just an atrenuator?
No machine gun sound here. But it's between the rx antenna and the receiver.RF is AC current at a spec'd frequency and power level. Adding a diode in-series will rectify that AC, turning it into DC. What you'll hear on the RX end would sound more like a machine gun, rather than anything intelligible.
But diodes ARE essential and used to isolate the signal for sampling it.