Topband: Monopole Elev Pattern w.r.t. Earth Conductivity

[Tom W8JI]

> I A-B or A-B-C tested several antennas, including a low dipole, the high 
> dipole, an element from my four square, a ~318 foot  insulated tower 
> vertical, and I think my tall omni vertical was about 190 feet at that 
> time.
>
> The tall vertical tower was definitely worse compared to shorter 
> verticals, and had almost no short skip signal around Georgia. I had 
> isolation chokes for lights and a base insulator, but that 300+ foot tower 
> was so poor I never used it as a vertical.

That may have been confusing. I never got in the habit of calling my 300ft + 
insulated tower a tall vertical, because I always considered it a support. 
It did have isolation chokes for cables and lights and a base insulator. It 
worked its way up in height from doing radial tests until it eventually 
reached ~318 feet.

The vertical I call a tall vertical has always been a 180-200 ft insulated 
vertical, so it is not really the tallest vertical. It was just the one that 
worked best as a tall vertical.

The really tall tower was so poor for overall use I just grounded the base 
when I rebuilt it with Rohn 65G a few years ago, so now it is no longer 
available as a series-fed structure. It has a ground system around it that 
allows other test antennas, and for a while I had two four squares. Since 
the 300 ft gets hit by lightning at least once in every storm, it is too 
much trouble to have cables run out to a four square with ground radials. 
Lightning current melted an LMR400 cable shield every other storm.