[TowerTalk] 80 meter wire vertical

[jimlux]

On 9/13/17 9:37 PM, Tom Osborne wrote:
> If you look back at pictures of the early stations, a lot of them had a
> horizontal wire with 4 or 5 wires in a flat-top configuration. Most of them
> were between a couple of supports and fed with a single wire.  73
> Tom W7WHY
>

That's a very common configuration - it's basically a capacitively 
loaded short vertical.

Back then, they were working at pretty low frequencies - hundreds of 
meters wavelength (200m and shorter is a wasteland, so let's let 
amateurs use it)

Empirically, they'd find quickly that a top loaded short vertical is a 
fairly effective radiator - it's the center of the dipole that carries 
the highest current after all.

If you look at pictures of Omega stations (radiating at 11 kHz) that T 
antenna is a pretty common configuration (with a gigantic loading coil 
at the base to boot). The lowfer folks found that too.