Topband: Verticals by the sea

[W9UCW--- via Topband]

This is purely anecdotal. I visited San Andres & Providencia Islands  
twenty times between 1970 and 1990. I always operated 160 during those  visits. 
On three occasions, at three different locations,  I set up a 43  foot 
"Minooka Special" within 30 feet of the waters edge and had  some radials running 
out into the sea. On the rest of the trips I  operated from the QTH of 
HK0BKX, HK0DMA, HK0COP or one of the other  resident Hams. They were all 
2000-3000 feet inland from the sea. You can't get  much further from the water 
because San Andres is 7.5 miles long and 1.5 miles  wide.
 
The difference in success between waters edge  and a half mile inland was 
like night and day using the same antenna  system. The seaside locations 
usually brought us "twenty over nine" reports from  the US as well as Europe 
using 100 watts on 160. We even ran phone patches on  160, There was no 
satellite phone service in the earlier  years. 
 
On Providencia we used a 130 foot wire from  our second story room at the 
Aury Hotel. It ran over a salt marsh/lagoon to  the second story window of a 
house. We warned the owner to stay away from  the end of that wire. We fed 
it against the hotel plumbing system. It worked  surprisingly well.
 
BTW, as an aside, the telephone system between  San Andres and Providencia 
in those days was a couple 100 watt RCA SSB rigs  on 5.3 mHz feeding dipoles 
about 30 feet high. The islands are 50 miles apart.  Carrier pidgeons would 
have worked better.
 
73, Barry