[TowerTalk] Radials vs vertical height

Jim Lux jimlux at earthlink.net
Mon Apr 2 23:45:23 EDT 2007


At 07:14 PM 4/2/2007, Dan Zimmerman N3OX wrote:
> > That's why many people have good success with the inverted L. If it is made
> > longer than a quarter wave length the radiation resistance rises and a good
> > ground becomes less important but it seems few recognize that.
> >
> > I mentioned long ago in this thread that a 1/2 wave vertical 
> needs almost no
> > ground to work pretty well and most seemed to want to ignore it 
> and continue
> > to bitch about how many radials you need or the antenna won't work.
>
>Yep, my 60 footer kicks butt on 40m.  Probably would with just a
>ground rod, too,  You buy an HF2V and you put it over a ground rod and
>you're going to have a miserable signal.
>
>You put up a resonant inverted L with ZERO radials, and again, you're
>going to have a miserable signal.

kind of depends on where the feedline exterior choke is... if you put 
the choke at the transmitter, you'd have at least one radial... the 
outside of the coax.


>It should probably be mentioned that the author of the (really overall
>rather good) QST article in question has ***EIGHT*** radials on his
>inverted L and seems to live in a region of the country with ***30mS/m
>soil conductivity***!!!  As far as I can tell from Low Band DXing,
>this probably puts him in the 1-2dBi range.

Holy cow.. is he living in a perptually damp clay floodplain?


Jim 




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