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Re: [TowerTalk] Shunt fed tower for 160m

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Shunt fed tower for 160m
From: "Lux, Jim" <jim@luxfamily.com>
Date: Fri, 8 Apr 2022 11:26:35 -0700
List-post: <mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
On 4/8/22 8:58 AM, Grant Saviers wrote:
EZNEC has a feature to make a XYZ grid of wires, the manual advises less than 1/10wl between them, although I use a finer mesh.  So some insight can be gained with the roof insulated from ground (no walls connecting it to ground).

The hard part is how the metal roof is grounded.  With NEC4.2 a buried ground can be set up, not so in NEC2.  Connecting the roof via something (mesh, separate wires) can take a lot of time to set up, then the high accuracy compute time can be significant.  I've also run some models that run into numerical computation problems, I think because of the large number of segments and junctions. The current distributions made no sense and some tweaking of the model yielded sensible patterns.

From my modeling, I think (and one experience) the grounding of the roof may have a significant effect.  Elevated radials should not be grounded.


the rule of thumb for "mesh to simulate solid surface" is that the circumference of the wire should be approximately the spacing. And around 1/10th wavelength is good, both for spacing and segment length.  If you're doing it in raw NEC, the GM card and clever wire numbering is your friend.

The tricky parts are joining the meshes at the edges, so that segments line up.

These days, it runs pretty fast: I was running some models of two crossed fan dipoles supported by a steel pipe over a steel mesh laying on the ground, with the full SOMNEC soil model, and fill times for 2100 segments were around 30 seconds and factor time about 2 seconds.  Fill time goes as the square of number of segments, factor goes as the cube.  (This was on a 2 year old Macbook pro, running NEC4.2)


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