As I recall, ZF1EJ's station uses a log periodic, a tribander and possibly other antennas and he is on the southern side of the island. Log periodic antennas typically do not have much gain if they were using that. While there is no proof that I am aware of, stations new the sea facing their target zone, like D4B/D4C, CU2X, VY2ZM etc do exceptionally well.
Verticals on the beach are great for expeditions. In March 2000, I set up two 40m verticals on the northern beach of Grand Cayman (one was a parasitic element) and also a low 40m dipole and the verticals were 10dB louder than the dipole. I am sure that a high beam would be better, however this suitcase station was good enough to win a contest plaque. John KK9A - P40A To: Juan EA5RS <ea...@ono.com> Subject: Re: Topband: Modeling the proverbial "vertical on a beach" From: Stan Stockton <wa5...@gmail.com> Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2014 07:03:02 -0500 I know what I am going to say isn't talking about 160m, but pertains to a vertical on the beach. Quantifying, with anything but anecdotal data, the difference between a horizontal antenna located inland versus a vertical on the beach would take something more than a short experiment but here is another experiment that uses RBN. My son, ZF2DX, is living in Cayman Islands. I went down in May and we planned to operate from the beach in the WPX Contest. On Friday I was in the process of putting up some simple verticals when we were asked whether we would like to join a small group at ZF1A. They would change category to M2 if we would operate with them instead of operating separately with both in MS category. We decided air conditioning would be nice and it would be fun to try to win the M2 category so I took down the verticals and we joined them. Sunday afternoon when Kevin and I were finished with our operating time slots we decided to go to the beach for about an hour, put up a 15m vertical with only two radials, use 100w and then look at the RBN. ZF1A was on 15m using a Yagi at 100 feet pointed toward Europe and 1200w power. We compared spots at the same time to a large number of Skimmer stations. As I recall in some cases we were in the range of -2 dB to -0 dB on some comparisons and in no case were we down more than about 5 dB. Having both operated from the big station all weekend, we both walked away from the beach before ever looking at the RBN with the belief that it was a big improvement, just using a 12 foot vertical with two radials. That belief was reinforced after we compared using RBN. If ZF1A had been using 100w instead of 1200w and a single, ground mounted vertical with any number of radials instead of the Yagi at 100 feet, I can only imagine how much stronger we would have been. I was converted into a believer and would not need specific quantitative data to know that with very little effort I could put up some simple antennas on the beach and be competitive with a large station with horizontal antennas located inland. In fact give me about 6 dB over a single vertical on the waters edge and you would need a very large station located inland to compete. 73...Stan, K5GO _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband