[TowerTalk] What *is* the optimum open wire line impedance

[Jim Lux]

Which brings up an interesting question..
What would the best impedance be for open wire line, assuming you have some sort of tuner at the feeding end, so you don’t care from a drive standpoint.
And assuming you’re feeding some sort of dipole that isn’t necessarily resonant at all the bands you might use it for (probably short on lower bands and long on higher)?

There’s some sort of trade to higher Z, because currents will be lower, so IR loss might be less.  But, then, these kinds of systems have a fair amount of reactive impedance at the antenna, so there’s circulating current between tuner and antenna, transformed by (likely) a fraction of a wavelength transmission line.

My sort of gut feel is that it doesn’t matter very much. but it wold be interesting to know.