[TowerTalk] simultaneous Horizontal and Vertical antennas

[Gary Schafer]

Tom Rauch wrote:
> All of the time a practice like this severely increases
> fading where signal levels from the two antennas are close.
> It may reduce the number of people operating on or near the
> TX frequency, but everyone should consider it also increases
> fading in a broad unpredictable area.
> 
>  > Secondly....with respect to the original concept of
> running parallel
> 
>>vertical and horizontal antennas to get multiple
> 
> polarizations...
> 
>>twaddle!
> 
> 
> Doesn't work. What you get is a skewed pattern with wider
> beamwidth and less defined polarization. In every direction
> the resulting pattern is a single polarization that is the
> vector sum of the two fields in that direction.
> 
How do FM stations manage to transmit dual polarity?


> The ionosphere will scramble the polarization, anyway...what
> 
>>he's doing is simultaneously exciting high and low
> 
> angles...(assuming
> 
>>the vertical has a decent ground system.)  He's also
> 
> destroying the dipole
> 
>>pattern.
> 
> 
> As the above statement points out, the concept of thinking
> of this as two totally isolated and independent signals is
> wrong.
> The actual result is it simply tips or tilts the
> polarization of the pattern in every area where each antenna
> has significant radiation.
> 
What do you think I was seeing when I phased vertical and horizontal 
antennas together on 10 meters? I found that with severe rapid fading on 
either vertical or horizontal alone, when I switched to both phased 
together that the fading smoothed out. No more deep fades into the noise.

I did find that by phasing the two as right hand or left hand circular 
that the signal was rapidly shifting between left hand and right hand as 
confirmed by swapping sense. But with the antennas in phase at those 
times it worked quite well.


> Sometimes we want to transmit a broad beamwidth signal, but
> the best solution is to just design an antenna that does
> that and understand doing so severely increases fading in
> the wide area (angle and direction) where both antennas have
> significant FS.
> 
> 
>>I'd bet he'd get better results by switching between them
> 
> and picking
> 
>>the better antenna at any given moment.
> 
> 
> I bet that also. The reason broadcast stations quickly
> abandoned 5/8th wave verticals is the combination of high
> and low angles caused by the high angle lobe that appears
> with the 5/8th led rise to severe fading outside of the
> strong groundwave area of the antenna. This effect was so
> severe they actually called shorter verticals "non-fading
> verticals".


But here you are talking about multipath propagation.

> 
> How you tune and load each amplifier plus other less
> esoteric things like feedline length control where the new
> nulls are as well as where the new main lobes are formed.
> 
> 73 Tom
> 

73
Gary  K4FMX