Amateur Radio Oxymorons

[n2ize]

I know some of you here on the island will think, "Yeah there are a few too many morons on the air," but there are more oxymorons used on the air and on the DX clusters. While browsing through the clusters today one person's comment was "59 on my new 33 foot random wire." If ever there were an oxymoron, that has to be up there with the classics.

First the word random would tell me it's an unknown length, so if it's 33 feet it is a known length, it's not random anymore. Random is an adjective which denotes having a value which cannot be determined but only described probabilistically: a random variable. So if you know the length it is not random. A random wire would be one which you put up from a spool of wire you pick up at a hamfest and used some of it here and there for various projects in the past and just used the rest of it for an antenna project having no clue as to how much wire is on the spool.

Anybody else have an oxymoron to contribute? Of course one of my favorites is 73's. Hams tend to say that stupid little phrase often and it is an oxymoron of the capitol kind. Best Regards's just don't look right, nor sound right. Why place that extra "s" at the end, when it's already there?

Bring them on! :)

It would depend mainly on how the length was selected... If it was selected uniformly and randomly then it could be described as "random length" and we could speak in terms of the probability of selecting that particular length. But if the length was predetermined before cutting the wire, and hence no longer a randomly selected value then the probability of selecting that particular length would be 1.

A random variable is a mapping of a sample space to some value (usually, but not necessarily, a real value). So, for example, in terms of wire length if a sample space includes a continuous set of values between 50-100 feet and X is a random variable on that space we can use X as a value, i.e (X <= 75 ) if we are speaking in terms of probabilities of X i.e. Pr(X<= 75).

With respect to ham radio and "random antennas" its more an issue of semantics than precise mathematical definition. So in amateur/SWL lingo "random antenna" refers to any antenna that is not necessarily mathematically related to the exact wavelength(s) in use. Or, so they say.

I would say it is an oxymoron depending on how the actual legth was selected, i.e. randomly or predetermined.