Eddie I don't recall claiming I was dxing late into the night when others around me could not,
I have not done any dxing on the 50mhz vectors, I think you are mixing up different peoples claims,
I did recently mention dxing into the night when all others fall silent but that was poking fun at Vortex,
late night dxing when all other antennas fall silent is just one of the Bullcrap claims that Vortex made along with the original q82 been consistently 2s-units up on a vector 4000 in their advertising,
None of what they claimed is true, I would argue with everything they claim,
its not even .82wave,
If you are talking about experiments on 27mhz years ago then yes I could talk & hear further than locals on poorly installed 5/8waves & I still can hear & talk to people my locals can't hear for noise,
I did think I was changing the takeoff angle because tweaking the dimensions & retuning the gamma gave different signals on TX & RX, models said otherwise,
DB talked about NEC not showing anything below 0 degrees when ground is included in the model in the past,
I don't know how that relates to my tests,
I have said what I think was happening & how I ended up with longer than 3/4wave but shorter than 7/8wave as the best in my situation and other similar places,
Even going from 1/4wave cone to 3/8wave cone would be hard to see on most radio meters & impossible on my yaesu bar graph s-meter,
most if not all sdr receivers have dBm meters but not all of them are calibrated,
I used to use my fluke87 & a Marconi precision attenuator to see small changes in signal,
Then I got the ep300 which is calibrated in dBm & other units,
The sdr makes comparing antennas over a very wide bandwidth inexpensive & gives you units that mean the same to everybody using a calibrated dBm meter,
They do lots of other things but i was only interested in the metering,
The rsp1a simultaneously displays calibrated s-units for HF bands & VHF/UHF bands,
so you can see what your radio meter should be indicating.
