[TowerTalk] vertical ground experiment

[Bill Turner]

ORIGINAL MESSAGE:

On Wed, 20 Jun 2007 18:51:45 +0000, w2cdo at comcast.net wrote:

>So I ran a ground wire from my 80 meter inverted L (60' up, 7' across) to my in-ground 30,000 gallon swimming pool and dropped the bare copper into the water.  The total length of the path created is about 65'.  Anyone ever try this? 

------------ REPLY FOLLOWS ------------

If you are interested in measuring the effectiveness of your ground
you can perform an experiment, if you have an SWR analyzer or the
equivalent.

A 1/4 wave vertical over perfect ground should measure about 36 ohms
of pure resistance at the feed point. Any loss in the ground will be
added to the 36 ohms and can be easily measured. 

If for example, you measure 50 ohms you might think you have an
excellent match, and you do, but you have about 14 ohms of resistance
in series with the ground plane. Not good. 

Bill W6WRT