Exactly. Well, I don't "believe" in grounding except for safety reasons, because a good rf to earth connection is so difficult to obtain ;-)
My "believe" is that if I am pushing some electrons into the wire, I have to take them from somewhere else (my rig can't create or destroy them), and if there is no obvious counterpoise (or good rf connection to earth turning this huge electron reservoir into a counterpoise) I take them from the TRX's case. So, in my situation, my antenna's two "poles" are formed by the wire on one end and the trx housing on the other end. My wire has a capacitance to earth and a capacitance to the rig, my rig has a capacitance to earth and by touching the rig I increase the former two of them (but become part of the antenna). A good rf ground would be the best choice (if ground conductivity is high enough so that the capacitance between antenna and ground is not too lossy), but in general I prefer to increase the capacity between antenna wire and counterpoise (because the lossy antenna to ground capacitance becomes less important). Yes, I know putting 1000 sq ft of chicken wire fence onto e arth would be slightly better, but I am a "quick and dirty guy" ;-) Actually it is something I was always expecting to happen earlier (so no big surprise for me, I immediately knew what to do: touch the rig!) but never happened to me. I have been using this same piece of wire for something like 10 years now, and have used it with a FT817+ ZM2 atu, a K2 + internal atu, and now with the KX3. I was always expecting it to behave differently when using a battery powered rig instead of a rig connected to the power supply. I could not determine a different behaviour with the ZM2, because this thing tunes almost everything with very similar knob settings (so I would not be able to tell) but with high losses due to its high Q in some situations. The K2 could tune this same wire in the same situation even when battery powered and w/o ground. However, the impedance range of the K2 tuner should be higher (I think I noticed from the diagrams it uses larger inductivities, but still have to check), as the K2 with ground can tune the wire on 160 which the KX 3 can't (I don't care because it is a dummy load on 160 anyway). So, if you can't tune 20 mtrs of wire on 10 meg and below, try touching the rig, and then probably follow the manual (or your licence course materials) and connect at least this "pedestrian trailing wire" to it and don't blame it on the tuner (or Elecraft) ;-) Vy 73 Ralf, DL6OAP Am 19.05.2013 um 23:14 schrieb AG0N-3055 <mcduf...@ag0n.net>: > On Sun, 19 May 2013 22:59:50 +0200, Ralf Wilhelm wrote: > >> Obviously the "counterpoise" was missing (or in my words the capacitance of >> the case to ground was not high enough). I could not test if plugging the >> headphones in and using them is sufficient to increase the capacitance >> sufficiently ;-) > > Sounds to me like you don't have your radio properly grounded (earthed?) > in the first place. > > Gary > -- > http://ag0n.net > 3055: http://ag0n.net/irlp/3055 > NodeOp Help Page: http://ag0n.net/irlp > ______________________________________________________________ > Elecraft mailing list > Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft > Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm > Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net > > This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net > Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html
