[TowerTalk] The Care and feeding of an 80 meter Zepp

[Jim Brown]

On Tue, 29 Mar 2005 05:03:53 -0900, Justin Burket (KL1RL) 
wrote:

>Take the feed line from the 300 ohm twin lead and stick it 
>right in the center conductor of the coax connector on the 
>tuner.  Take the other side of and ground that sucker!  

That is NOT my advice. 

My advice is to throw away the 300 ohm line and the coax. 
Simply extend the wire (using another piece of wire) into your 
shack, and connect that wire to the center conductor of the 
tuner input. 

Then, create your counterpoise by any means available, 
following the ideas given to you by my post and Tom, W8JI. 
Connect that counterpoise to the chassis of the tuner and the 
transceiver. 

>From an analytical point of view, you already have a half-wave 
wire, so when you add onto it, it will be somewhere between a 
half wave and 3/4 wave. That's a reasonably easy load for most 
tuners to tune. 

Another point. You are not "grounding" the radio to the water 
pipes, you are making the water pipes, and everything else you 
can think of, part of your counterpoise. That has NOTHING to do 
with grounding. If one or more of the things you use to make up 
your counterpoise happens to be grounded, that's OK, but 
immaterial. 

Jim Brown K9YC