[TowerTalk] Raised Radial Spacing

[Gedas]

Jim not sure if this was what you were after but in one of your paragraphs you said " What I’ve not looked for recently is whether anyone has modeled whether the direction of the wire or whether just dumping chopped up wire into the soil works. " this reminded me of something from many decades ago. 

When I got out of school my 1st job was with a firm in Northern Virginia call Atlantic Research Corp. It was really an awesome place to work and they had a terrific technical library. Anyway, after several decades of hostile take overs etc the company was swallowed and had to dissolve. They told the employees to help themselves to any books in that library. I was late to the party but I did snag a couple dozen gems. 

One was a study that was done by, I think, the USN down in Antarctica. They wanted to see the effects radials had on the directivity of different vertical antennas on different frequencies. Someplace down in the dungeon I should still have that study. Anyway, in some cases they ran stupid long radials but in very limited directions (like a gob of them over just 5 degrees then 10 degrees etc etc) then they measured the verticals azimuth directivity by way of FS. I seem to remember the radials were many, many miles long in some cases laid on the snow surface. Bottom line was that very directive and efficient antennas could be had if you had enough real estate. 73 Gedas W8BYA 


From: "Jim Lux" <jim at luxfamily.com> 
To: towertalk at contesting.com 
Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2025 1:07:17 PM 
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Raised Radial Spacing