Hi Ron, I have played and fooled around with verticals for many years and as my friend K3RA, Rol Anders says... "A vertical radiates poorly in all directions!!" LOL! At present I do have a vertical dipole... Gap Challenger Vertical and it does perform acceptably! But, I also have a dipole up about 35 feet up.
I think it was the HyGain 14AVQ or the 18AVQ up on the house roof with radials/guide wires for all bands and had it all grounded to a 1/2 pipe that ran down along outside of the water well for 200 feet. Now maybe that setup was not suppose to work but it worked like gang busters. At sundown when the bands started going out the beams lost it but I stayed right in there with the DX! That was many years ago when I lived in Tenn. at the Sequachie Valley. Our Parsonage was up on a hill and I was in the clear. That was in the mid 60s. I have tried some unique grounding devices through the years and they worked out pretty good. Mercy, I even tried the old Gotham vertical from Miami Beach... The 23 foot vertical I was using a Gonset G66B Receiver and a Elmac AF 67 Transmitter in Cedartown, Georgia. I was not sure I was getting RF to the vertical so I put the transmitter in Key Down and went outside and touched the vertical with the palm of my hand.... It took weeks for the burn to heal on my hand. I was a novice then and knew very little. My radio teacher who was preparing me for the General class license took pity on me and built me a 75/40 dipole with one coax. I had the 40 running east and west and the 75 running north and south. Come to think of it It must have been a NVIS antenna!! <g> I had a Gap Eagle Vertical back in 1993 and it performed well with the ground plane it uses. Had it up a few feet above the roof. I have some information I want to share about NVIS antennas but will leave that for another email. Paul Paul Gates K1 #0231 KX1 #1186 XG1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----- Original Message ----- From: "Ron D'Eau Claire" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <elecraft@mailman.qth.net> Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 12:44 PM Subject: RE: [Elecraft] RE: Low Antenna on Mountain Top Bill, W4ZV wrote: Over flat terrain, a dipole up ~1/2 wavelength has 7-8 dB gain over a vertical at typical 30 degree takeoff angles. On a mountain top, the TOA goes down because the effective height is raised. --------------------------------------------------- When people say "vertical", they usually mean a 1/4 wavelength (or less) radiator. Such verticals are HUGELY dependent upon the ground return for their efficiency. There's been an on-going argument about that since Marconi hisself was tinkering with them, but that standard for comparison is that a 1/4 wave radiator should have something on the order of 50 to 100 0.2 wave radials if it's going to be comparable of a 1/2 wave radiator. That's not to say an vertical is always inefficient, but that one can't really assess how efficient it is when using other ground systems and locations. The only exception to that is a vertical over salt water, as in at sea on a ship. Short of such a massive ground system, a decent comparison with a horizontal 1/2 wave radiator can only be made with a vertical 1/2 wave radiator (or at least with radiators of the same physical length if both are less than 1/2 wave). Even then there will be huge differences based on the propagation involved, although on HF it's far less than VHF and above. On HF, reflection/refraction of the wave in the ionosphere pretty well rotates and mixes the polarization. Ron AC7AC _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com