Topband: Shunt Fed Tower

[Ken Brown]

Hi Goose,
>   My tower, however, is series fed (it sits on  a base 
> insulator) and it does not seem to be too tall as I can work all the DX I  can hear. 
>   
I suspect that your situation is fairly unique in that most who have towers do not have a base insulator. Even for those fortunate enough to have a base insulator, I wonder if shunt feeding, and bypassing that insulator with a big copper strap, might be easier. If you have other antennas mounted on that tower, isn't it necessary to use chokes or some other method to decouple the 160 meter signal from those feed lines where they separate from the tower? With a shunt fed tower or folded monopole with the tower grounded this is not necessary. I think my choice (if I had that choice to make, and I sure wish I did.) would be to use series feed with a base insulated tower only when there were no other antennas mounted on the tower.

DE N6KB