we see now why most yudas are for much lower frequencies than 2.4 GHz
working up here is a pain
the only thing to do might be to get some metal tubing of some sort and just use that with the clever sleeve trick
wound wire baluns seem to be kinda useless up here, because magnetic cores don't really work
knew we should have gone for the endfire helical
tangentially: we were initially confused by why folded dipoles are used, because we were expecting one big reason when it's really a lot of little reasons
those that we are aware of so far:
1) impedance is about matched to a convenient type of ladder line, or when used in a yuda, brings the impedance back up into the 50-75 ohm range
2) there are a lot of different ways to feed them
3) you can attach them by a very structurally-convenient location to a metal support with no insulation and they still work fine
4) the entire radiant element is a single piece of metal, which is also great for structural considerations
they're generally just very sturdy shapes and we like that a lot
we probably should have tried making all the coresonant elements of our cane out of folded dipoles instead of straight ones just to make the whole thing less wicked as a melee weapon
anyway, it's cool in some ways to discover that a classic current balun is kind of useless here, because it means that our round-the-beam feedline wrap job from before probably wasn't great and the cane still did work okay like that
basically, we still have some easy enough adjustments to make to improve it a lot.
@diodelass It's telling when another witch with a degree can't tell if you're describing Magic, RF equipment, or Both.
@Motodrachen RF is the sort of thing where known theory still applies and the behaviors of systems can, in fact, be understood and predicted, but doing so is complicated enough that it's often just not done
you can get good at building radio equipment without really knowing the math and just listening to the folklore instead, which we honestly think is the quintessence of magic
@Motodrachen our physics degree gave us an understanding of electromagnetism that we do think helps our antenna projects, but it's not like we sit here writing out equations on a whiteboard - the stuff we do is all drawing on the intuition we got from that, and using it to make sense of the folklore.
@Motodrachen honestly, RF is just a subset of magic