[TowerTalk] Vertical Antenna Question

[Jim Brown]

On 4/8/2020 9:50 PM, K6XT via TowerTalk wrote:
> Some years ago for a time I had a GAP Titan half wave vertical as my Get On The Air Now antenna. I tried ground mount, elevated 5 feet, 10 feet, 20 feet. Ten feet was the magic performance number. I did not see any advantage by raising the GAP base to 20 feet.

Was it mounted on a conductive tower or mast? Antennas of this generic 
type (loaded center-fed dipole) do NOT work well on a conductive mount, 
because it detunes the antenna, changing the current distribution and 
the match.

Your observations re: poor performance on 80M is consistent with that 
report's observation that if we want good performance on the lowest band 
where you want to use it, we should choose a model designed to work on 
the next band down in frequency.

73, Jim K9YC