(Source: Ampegon)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Van Hoy, who shares a link to this YouTuber who stumbled upon shortwave station, WBCQ, while driving through rural Maine in 2018. He obviously didn’t understand what the site was at the time–nor the fact that the owner loves collecting vintage equipment.
The video gives the impression of WBCQ being a place of mystery and intrigue. If he only knew that he would have likely been welcomed with open arms and gotten a detailed tour had he only contacted the station!
Weirdly I ran across that video a few days before you posted this. In watching the video I saw the callsign of the station and looked it up and there is a lot of info about the station on the web. I find it kind of surprising that the author of the video did not do the same thing.
I’m glad the SWLing Post isn’t all “news.” Everybody needs a good laugh from time to time, especially in this day and age. Anyone who loves radio will at least smile at this fellow who knows little about the topic and could not quite comprehend what he was seeing. The juxtaposition of the old house with”redneck” front porch and monster antenna seemed like such an unreal contrast to him, and, actually it is! Thanks for posting, Thomas…
That’s a beautiful antenna! See the four horizontal folded dipoles going across, and there are four rows of them, for 16 total dipoles!
There is also a matrix of wires on the other side that form a reflector.
The whole thing is steerable, too.
I would estimate that the antenna gain is about 16 dBd, that is, 16db gain over just a dipole.
It’s a great directional HF antenna!
Does a poorly-made video from 2018 really count as news? I don’t feel like we need to stop the presses here.
I wasn’t actually posting this as news. I think most readers here see the irony of WBCQ being framed as a site of mystery. Even a simply Google search would have yielded all of the answers. 🙂