Well, Stuart, I originally bought the site of our last ten years FD's because
it is very close to town and it's radio quiet. I drove around seemingly forever
with a mobile rig looking for land and literally found this right under my nose
- and at the end of the ridge I live on now. The clay bed this ridge is made of
thins out there, and standing water is only about 15 feet down.
I put a three bay tractor and implement shed up and that was where we had FD.
Had, becuase I'm finally building a house there and the tractor shed is full of
stuff I have no place to move. Hopefully, we will be back there in '05 or '06.
I tried a G5RV, dipole, and a few more wire antennas before our first FD out
there, and the Vees at roughly 20 feet gave by far the best performance. Fed
with ladder line through a 6:1 balun, they are resonant at 2.5 mHz, meaning
lots of lobes on the higher bands. We also had tribanders for the two regular
stations and a couple of years one for the Novice station.
As you say, the west Vee is very good from central Texas west, the NE Vee is
very good from the Carolinas north and east. And the E/W dipole works quite
well into the upper midwest as well as the area around here. If we can, we stay
on 20 and up for the full 24, but most of the time we have to drop to 80 or 40
nights. Which gets right noisy when the heat lightning is going full circle
around us.
It sounds as if "ground," meaning a conductive layer of earth, is quite a ways
down at your FD site. Therefore, it's natural that our results will vary widely
as a result.
73 Pete Allen AC5E
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