Topband: W1WCR Beverage book

[Tom Rauch]

> At my location in northeast Indiana the ground is very flat and highly
> conductive.  According to all I've read from W1WCR and ON4UN my
> antennas should not work very well. 

The ground where you live is not all that good Gary. Many measurement 
methods published were flawed, and that results in us sometimes 
concluding we have better ground than we do. One method that comes to 
mind is the one that used to be in the Handbooks, developed by W2FMI 
(I believe).  That method used low frequency ac measurements to 
estimate RF conductivity, but that concept is totally useless.  

About the highest conductivity I have seen outside of saltwater 
marshes is in the range of 30-50 mS/m.

When I lived in Ohio, in a section of what was the old Black Swamp, I 
had a black mucky soil that was saturated with water. In that area, 
it was about 35mS/m in the AM BC band. Using a dc or AC test would 
make me conclude it was hundreds or thousands of mS/m, but it wasn't. 

Saltwater and any type of wire, even iron, would be thousands or many 
thousands of times better than the best dirt we could find outside of 
a salt-rich marsh, like those in NJ.

73, Tom W8JI
W8JI@contesting.com