The Sacred Faraday Blanket of Saint QRMbert

A tragic tale of one man’s portable delusion

There once was a ham.....

Let’s call him Gordon Q. Meshington, but he went by QRMbert on the air. A proud POTA operator. A minimalist. A man who shaved grams off his gear with a titanium spork and a hollow paddle keyer. He believed in efficiency. And he believed in Faraday cloth.

He'd read about it on the forums. “Conductive! RF shielded! Works for NASA!”
Gordon was hooked. Wire radials? Pfft. “Boondocking boomer tech,” he called them.

“Why carry twenty wires,” Gordon said, “when I can lay down this holy sheet of nanoconductive blessing?”

The Ritual Begins

And so, one Saturday morning, Gordon set off for his latest POTA activation, deep in the pine forests of Hype Valley.

He hiked 7 kilometers uphill, barefoot (for grounding, obviously), carrying only his radio, his telescopic whip, and the cloth — a shiny, silvery square, pre-folded with reverence next to his field log.

At the summit, he surveyed the view. Breathed deeply. Unfurled his vertical like a samurai drawing a sword.

And then, with almost erotic anticipation, he spread the Faraday cloth beneath it and clipped it to his antenna with crocodile clips.

Not just placed. Smoothed. With reverent strokes.
Corners aligned with magnetic north.
He even whispered: “Namaste, oh sacred mesh of Maxwell.”

The Glorious Nothingness

With everything set, Gordon connected his coax, tuned his antenna (1:1! As if that meant anything), and called CQ.

And then…

Silence.

Minutes passed. Then hours. Nothing but squirrels mocking him in Morse. A deer walked by, shook its head, and left. His SWR meter looked smug, as if to say: "Sure, match all you want. It won’t help you."

Gordon grew impatient. He checked the feedline. Switched batteries. Repositioned the cloth slightly clockwise — maybe that was the issue.

He called CQ again. “POTA POTA POTA this is QRMbert portable in the wild, anyone?”

Still nothing.

The Realization (Spoiler: It Never Came)

Another hour passed. A friend texted:

“Bro, are you even getting out? You’re -25 on FT8.”

Gordon frowned. How could this be? The cloth was conductive. The forums promised him decibel miracles. It was supposed to “act like a groundplane.”

But the problem was simple: it didn’t.

What he had laid out was not a groundplane.
It was a thermal blanket of RF despair.
It was a patch of resistance wrapped in hope.
It was a picnic mat for bad ideas.

The Return Home

Defeated, Gordon packed up.

As he folded his precious cloth, a gust of wind tried to carry it away — perhaps even the universe itself was trying to dispose of it.

Back home, he posted on QRZ:

“Still getting bad reports from the field. Could it be solar conditions?”

Yes, Gordon. The sun. Definitely the sun. Nothing to do with the literal piece of fabric you thought could replace a tuned radial field.

Moral of the Story?

Faraday cloth is:

  • A great thing to wrap your sandwiches in.
  • Perfect if you're cosplaying as an RF burrito.
  • Useless as a ground system for a vertical antenna.

If your idea of a counterpoise folds up next to your hand sanitizer, you're doing it wrong.

If you want to radiate, lay wire — not hope.

Written by Joeri Van Dooren, ON6URE – collector of failed antenna myths, roaster of portable delusions, part-time antenna exorcist, and certified therapist for hams traumatised by 1:1 SWR obsessions. He also runs a support group: "Yes, It Matched, But Did It Radiate?"

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Written by Joeri Van Dooren, ON6URE – RF, electronics and software engineer, complex platform and antenna designer. Founder of RF.Guru. An expert in active and passive antennas, high-power RF transformers, and custom RF solutions, he has also engineered telecom and broadcast hardware, including set-top boxes, transcoders, and E1/T1 switchboards. His expertise spans high-power RF, embedded systems, digital signal processing, and complex software platforms, driving innovation in both amateur and professional communications industries.