[TowerTalk] antenna impedence and ground impedence??
Pete Smith
n4zr at contesting.com
Tue Apr 13 10:10:29 EDT 2004
At 09:02 AM 4/13/04, Tom Rauch wrote:
>This is just a bunch of wasted discussion because it would be much faster
>and more accurate to measure what you want to know........field strength.
>There is little point in saying something can be done and/or is easy to do
>and describing how to do it when none of us can do it because of the
>enormous difficulty and special hardware required.
I guess it depends on how much precision you need. For the amateur trying
to put up elevated radials, surely it doesn't even matter if you know the
ground characteristics, as long as you can resonate the radials in
place. Whether the resulting radial system is then 2 dB or 3, or 5 db less
good that 120 quarter-wave buried radials is something I leave for those
who are interested, and have the knowledge and hardware to do good FS
measurements.
This raises another question, though -- for those of us who are able to put
down some buried radials. The articles I have read recently by LB and
others suggest that the inherent ground characteristics of a site are a lot
more important than any practicable radial scheme. Put another way, if
your ground conductivity is relatively good you may be better off with
relatively few radials, while even the full Monty won't get you even if the
inherent conductivity is poor.
I'm curious, Tom -- before you chose your current site, did you erect a
test vertical and do FS measurements to get a sense of the conductivity?
73, Pete N4ZR
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