Tom is correct and the basic ideas have been around for nearly 70 years.
If you want to see where this all comes from, check out the article in QST
for July 2000, pages 38-44. You can take the equations in the appendix,
drop them into a spreadsheet and see for yourself how the performance of a
buried radial system behaves as you change things. There is also a long
list of references where all this comes from.
George Brown in his 1933 Ph.D. thesis pointed out that the size of the wire
had negligible effect! Radial wire size is a mechanical issue.
73, Rudy N6LF
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