Vintage radio aerial.

[FERNSEH]

My friend Kevin picked up this vintage radio aerial at the auto jumble at Ripon Racecourse.
Just how good were these aerials? One can imagine there was more signal pick-up from the unscreened feeder cable.
Anyway, he is going to clean up the brackets and fix it to his house.

DFWB.

[Nuvistor]

I remember seeing them but just like we see B1 and B3 aerials today, the radio aerials were not used. No idea how well they worked.

[Mike. Watterson]

Looks like something for circular polarised signals. Though two yagis at right angles with 90 degree phase shift by combination of offset of H & V and differing length coax on combiner is more popular and can be switched LH / RH, that aerial can't be.

[Julesomega]

Originally Posted by Mike. Watterson

Looks like something for circular polarised signals

Might be if any of the elements were fed as a dipole
As none are, it's a sculptural object fed at the base and has vertical polarisation and no directivity

[Nuvistor]

They were for MW and LW, I think it just gives the birds something to perch on.

[michamoo]

Here is one still in place in Cambridge city centre.

[Mr 1936]

I have something not dissimilar in my collection, called an Aerialite Anomast. It probably dates from the 1930's, and the brightly coloured box makes bold claims for its performance. It's basically a steel bracket to go on the chimney, with a double cone of copper wires about a foot long above it and an insulator where they are gripped by the bracket. One is then supposed to connect a single wire downlead running down to a MW/LW radio.

Reception would be almost as good if the upper fancy structure was removed and just the insulator part used to support the downlead (which is the bit actually functioning as a vertical aerial). However, the fancy shaped piece is essential to convince the buying public that it is something special !

[G6Tanuki]

There were various designs of these - the spiral-type as shown by the OP, a version which looked like a hedgehog (with a bunch of thick copper wires mounted at the base with their upper-ends spread out into a hemisphere) and a version which was a sort-of cone of wires with their upper ends all linked together - the "anomast" [an unfortunate name which makes me think of lower-bowel issues] is aone of these cone-types.

They were a "gimmick" - providing no real benefit to MW/LW reception apart from acting as a weak capacity-hat. The downlead provided 99% of the signal!

There's a pic of one of these 'spirals' on the excellent Wrightsaerials.tv site (to which I've contributed a few photos over the years) - see http://www.wrightsaerials.tv/aerialp...ient/065.shtml

In subsequent times, the "Joystick" SWL-antenna - basically a length of wire wound on a broomstick - took over this dubious sales-space. It 'worked' because its single-wire feeder picked up a bit of signal, and it was being sold to the SWL market at a time of high sunspot-numbers so you could pretty-much 'hear the world' with an AVOmeter-probe connected to your receiver's antenna-terminal.

[Biggles]

I like the way it says on the box that it improves selectivity. How do they achieve this? Hmm.

[crackle]

It looks like something designed to keep yobbos from climbing onto roofs.

Mike

[Graham G3ZVT]

Perhaps they were a status symbol, "We've got a wireless", in the same way as satellite dishes on the stone cladding became.

[Herald1360]

Originally Posted by Biggles

I like the way it says on the box that it improves selectivity. How do they achieve this? Hmm.

Because it's too small to damp the front end tuning much?

It selects only strong signals?

[russell_w_b]

Here's one in situ down the village.

[Ian - G4JQT]

Seen them on old houses. As others have said they are for LW/MW and possibly SW and were just useless gimmicks, around at a time when folks were even less familiar with the technicalities of aerials than they are now.

[Refugee]

I once spotted a photo of one that was like a long wire coiled like a big loose spring.

[Synchrodyne]

One wonders what kind of exchanges went on between the engineering and sales/marketing sides of the companies offering these fancy-looking, do-nothing “aerials.” Engineering saying that they are a bunch of 3-methyl indole and sales/marketing saying we’ve got to have them, and we must have a good technical story for them. The name “anomast” might well be related to a certain Shakespeare tragedy about a Roman general, but one can also imagine reasonably literate engineering folk suggesting, tongue-in-cheek, “anodyne”, and equally some folk in marketing thinking that it was a good “technical sounding” name, and one that morphed into “anomast”.

At one time the type shown here could be seen in New Zealand:



Maybe, just maybe these types of aerials were marginally useful in reducing corona interference:

Aerial Corona Interference WW 194812.pdf



Cheers,

[Herald1360]

"Anomast" is presumably just a contraction of "a no-mast (aerial)" into a vaguely technical sounding name.

[G8HQP Dave]

Such antennas act as a small capacity hat for the actual antenna, which is the downlead. This means that they do improve reception a little over what you would get with the downlead alone. However, a longer piece of wire would be cheaper but less noticeable for the neighbours. Hence the main function of these 'antennas' in the 40s and 50s was the same as some UHF TV antennas in the 60s: alerting your neighbours that you had the latest thing.

[AC/HL]

If nothing else, it's somewhere to terminate the downlead.

[linescan87]

Here's something similar in the August 1938 edition of Practical Wireless.