[Antennas] Butternut Vertical

[George, W5YR]

Chris, the tradeoff here is that with the arrangement you describe, you
have to have supports for four 60 ft wires in addition to the support for
the vertical. In order for the radials to perform properly they must be
resonated in pairs and preferably spaced at 90 deg intervals. This is quite
an array of wire and tubing up in the air, equivalent to two complete 75
meter dipoles plus the vertical.If there is so little room that a vertical
is under consideration, it is hard to see where the room will come from for
four such radials. At least with ground radials, they do not have to be
supported or tuned, and can be run almost anywhere there is space on the
ground. Furthermore, a fairly large number of relatively short - 0.2
wavelength or even less - radials has been shown to be more effective than
a small number of longer  - 0.25 wavelength or more - radials.

I know that some broadcast stations have experimented with elevated
radials, but the last I read of that on RRAA, every one of them had
returned to the normal ground radial setup.
I believe that Tom Rauch W8JI posted that some time ago.

A very practical matter with a multi-band vertical, such as the HF9-V is
that despite the advertising hype to the contrary, the darned things have
to be carefully tuned if you expect to have a fairly flat feedline on each
band. While the task is not all that difficult, it does require a few
iterations, adjusting coil lengths, some tubing lengths, stub lengths and
positions, etc. I truly wonder how one does all this with the antenna up in
the air 20 ft? Maybe on a roof where it is accessible, but on a pole or
mast, I can't see how it could ever be done without repeatedly taking the
antenna down, making an adjustment, putting it back up, testing, etc. 

So more power to anyone who can get such an antenna farm installed, but for
the difficulty of installing those four tuned radials, I would just as soon
install a single pair, fed with ladderline and have an allband antenna.
Only I would make the length 176 feet instead of 120 in order to have an
EDZ on 40 meters with capability of tuning on 160-10 meters. The wire could
be folded around on the ends with little effect on its performance.

Another factor is the intended application. With excellent radials - high
or low - the vertical will have relatively low high-angle radiation. This
might make it difficult to cover the shorter distances on 75 AM out to 1000
miles or so that Jim implied that was his interest.

At any rate, best of luck to Jim with his installation and I hope that
yours continues to work well for you.

73/72/oo, George W5YR - the Yellow Rose of Texas         
Fairview, TX 30 mi NE of Dallas in Collin county EM13qe   
Amateur Radio W5YR, in the 56th year and it just keeps getting better!
QRP-L 1373 NETXQRP 6 SOC 262 COG 8 FPQRP 404 TEN-X 11771 I-LINK 11735
Icom IC-756PRO #02121  Kachina 505 DSP  #91900556  Icom IC-765 #02437


CBoone@Earthlink.Net wrote:
> 
> All ground mounted verticals must have radials....BUT a vertical
> mounted at or >.07wl above ground will work 99% as well with only
> FOUR radials that are AT LEAST 1/4wl long at lowest freq...
> This was stated on a web site by W4RNL and I have confirmed it at home
> with a vertical mounted 20ft off the ground and it only has 4 60ft
> radials...works great on 80-10 and bandwidth/resonance is EXACTLY as it
> was on the ground with 32 radials...
> 
> Also BC stations with AM sticks on top of bldgs have reported the
> same thing...though the antenna has few radials there, being above
> earth ground allows it to work well with only a min compliment of
> radials...(one AM station here in Houston had that with its antenna
> atop the old Rice Hotel!)
> 
> Chris
> WB5ITT
> Houston