[TowerTalk] Using old coax for ground wire

[Jim Brown]

On Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:54:00 -0700 (GMT-07:00), Jim Lux wrote:

>How about on a vertical 1/4 wave antenna.. (which was what I was 
>thinking of in the context of RF grounds).

What we are looking for is a conductive plane to serve as a return 
for RF current and for the E and M fields associated with antenna 
current. While the earth CAN serve this function, it does so rather 
poorly, because it is quite lossy and thus burns RF power. Instead, 
we use radials, which serve as a low loss return for the current and 
the fields, increasing the antenna efficiency. 

There are excellent discussions of this on W2DU's and N6LF's 
websites, and the N6LF website includes some excellent new research 
on the effectiveness of various radial configurations. Google on 
their calls to find them. I had the good fortune of hearing Rudy 
present this work at Pacificon last weekend. 

73,

Jim Brown K9YC