HT and longer wires

[KD8LWX]

The other night I was sitting in a location playing with my VX-8R and SRH789 antenna. It was setup to receive APRS on channel B and I was receiving contacts.

Then I started listening to shortwave on channel A. This wasn’t coming in very good, so I attached a long SW wire to the SRH789 antenna. The short wave began to come in better. And here is the interesting part, so did the APRS.

I have no way of knowing what the SWR is on this setup.
What would have happened if I tried to TX APRS with that configuration?

 

[airplane1]

Probly nothing bad if your using low power and short qso.

 

[W5LZ]

With all the other features that radio has I would imagine that it has some protection from impedance mismatches. Does it? If so, and if that mismatch wasn't completely out of reason, then I would expect that you would produce some signal at the least. No way to tell how good of a signal though.
So, it boils down to if you wanna try it or not. Would I recommend it? No, I wouldn't. That's mainly cuz I don't want to possibly be the fault of something 'not good' happening. Would I try it if it were my radio? Probably, but then sometimes I do dumb things, you know? I figure you have a slightly better than a 50/50 chance of something not being real 'right' with using that random wire antenna.
Been feeling 'lucky' lately??
- 'Doc