This is purely anecdotal. I visited San Andres & Providencia Islands
twenty times between 1970 and 1990. I always operated 160 during those visits.
On three occasions, at three different locations, I set up a 43 foot
"Minooka Special" within 30 feet of the waters edge and had some radials
running
out into the sea. On the rest of the trips I operated from the QTH of
HK0BKX, HK0DMA, HK0COP or one of the other resident Hams. They were all
2000-3000 feet inland from the sea. You can't get much further from the water
because San Andres is 7.5 miles long and 1.5 miles wide.
The difference in success between waters edge and a half mile inland was
like night and day using the same antenna system. The seaside locations
usually brought us "twenty over nine" reports from the US as well as Europe
using 100 watts on 160. We even ran phone patches on 160, There was no
satellite phone service in the earlier years.
On Providencia we used a 130 foot wire from our second story room at the
Aury Hotel. It ran over a salt marsh/lagoon to the second story window of a
house. We warned the owner to stay away from the end of that wire. We fed
it against the hotel plumbing system. It worked surprisingly well.
BTW, as an aside, the telephone system between San Andres and Providencia
in those days was a couple 100 watt RCA SSB rigs on 5.3 mHz feeding dipoles
about 30 feet high. The islands are 50 miles apart. Carrier pidgeons would
have worked better.
73, Barry
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