Topband: Inverted L questions

[Peter Dougherty]

Hi all,

Just a question further to this topic from a couple of weeks ago. I 
just put the L in service tonight. I have a 40-80-160 vee (apex at 
65') up already, and it's an underachiever on receive to be sure, 
hence my desire to try something different.

The L is about 55' high, and I pruned it for best SWR at 1830, about 
1.3 or 1.4:1. I have eight 66' radials out so far; more will go down 
over the next week. The radials are all facing the opposite direction 
from the sloping part of the L (sloping part faces due east, 6 of the 
8 radials go straight west). The L slopes up from 55 to 70' on its 
support end. I don't have any matching network in place, and the SWR 
is decent after a pruning session this morning.

Using my MFJ-259 analyzer at resonance, it shows a Resistance value 
of 45 and a Capacitive reactance of 15.

Performance: the crappy old inverted V blows it out of the water, by 
1 to 2 S-units on average, and the noise increase on the L is 
positively huge (being a vertical, I suppose I should have been 
expecting that). I won't be using this as a receive antenna once the 
K9AY loop goes up, but I figured the L would still be better than the 
vee, given how low the vee is overall. Nothing spotted from Europe 
was receivable on the L, and as usual, just a faint whisper bordering 
on ESP on the vee.

Any idea what could be wrong? Just not enough radial-wire down on the 
ground, do you think? My soil is hard and extremely rocky, but no 
idea how conductive it is, etc. I will get another 250' of wire out 
tomorrow and probably 500' more on Monday, but before I invest 
another $50-100 in radial wire, I'm now wondering if I'm expecting 
too much from this thing?



73,

Peter,
W2IRT