Topband: 160 metre vertical with 'top loading'

[Tom Boucher]

I take your point Yuri, but my simplistic way of looking at the current decreasing along a straight quarter wave of wire is due to the current flow through it's distributed capacitance to ground. Maybe that is wrong and I should go back and look at my transmission line theory.  

Surely the fact that it is an electrical quarter wave is due to the straight wire being part of one very large coil turn and therefore having an inductance, combined with that distributed capacitance causing resonance at one particular frequency? If that is so, then isn't my theory of the current decay being due to flow through distributed capacitance along it's length still correct?

AA7JV said that the argument against current at both ends of the loading coil being the same, is that you cannot have high current and high voltage at the top of the coil because that represents much higher power than you are sticking into the base of the antenna. That's not true because we are talking about VA not Watts, i.e. there is a phase difference between V and I.

73
Tom G3OLB


<He is not correct!
<Have you looked at the "piece" of wire - quarter wave antenna, having the max current at the base and ZERO at the tip? And voltage low at the base and high at <the tip - corona?
<Where did the current go?
<It is the STANDING WAVE circuit, with superimposed forward and reflected RF currents creating cosinusoidal distribution ALONG the wire and not the DC <circuit.
<Why is it hard so understand that if current can vary along the straight wire, it can wary along the coiled wire too?


<Yuri K3BU.us