Topband: High and low angles

[Michael Tope]

From: "Tom Rauch" <w8ji at contesting.com>

> My best educated guess would go along with what Earl and
> others have said, that even with surrounding mountains a
> vertical would work wonders. ZL3REX is in that situation,
> and when Rex went from a low full wave horizontal loop to an
> Inverted L (with a GOOD ground system of at least a few
> dozen radials) his signal level increased significantly. Rex
> is the only one I know personally who had a situation like
> you describe and spent a long time comparing antennas in a
> blind A-B test.
> 
> 73 Tom


At the club station where I sometimes operate, we have a 160
meter inverted vee on a 45' telephone pole. The ends are pretty
close to the ground, but the whole thing is mounted literally at
the edge of a 400' cliff. It works "okay" (e.g. I can work stuff), but 
I haven't found it to be competitive with guys running verticals.
Oftentimes the guys in the area with verticals are in and out of
the pileup while I keep calling to no avail. One local here doesn't
even have a radial system under his shunt fed tower and he 
has beaten me out more times than I care to remember. During
the ARRL CW contest, I found LR2H calling CQ low in the band,
but he just couldn't hear me even though the dipole on the edge
of the 400' cliff is broadside to South America (and I was running
1500 watts to 7/8" hardline). After I spotted him on packet a huge 
pileup developed. I continued calling but I never got thru. One 
guy who did get through was AC6DD who was running an 18ft
high inverted-L kludged at the end of a saltwater pier (that's right
an 18 ft high vertical section). He punched through a bunch of
East Coast Multi-Multi's and was one of the few West Coast 
stations that I heard break through that pileup. I've also had
the pleasure of being beaten in a pileup to V73 by KH6DX/m
even though I was running 1500 watts to a 160 meter dipole
up in the clear at 90 feet (different station). Don was probably
on the beach with his big screwdriver antenna. 

Hopefully later this spring I'll get the 70 ft tower at the club station
shunt-fed so that I can do some real A-B comparisons between
the dipole on the cliff and the vertical. My money is on the vertical. 

73 de Mike, W4EF...................................