[Antennas] Radial Wires VS a wire or screen mesh

[Kevin C. Kidd CSRE/AMD]

The jest of all this is...  "Something is better than nothing".  Not
necessarily the best or even good but better.

Were I putting up a temp vertical for a contest I might try the chicken
wire to cover the ENTIRE nearfield area.  That, knowing that after a bit
of weathering the galvanized twisted connections will be intermittent
and not much of a conductor at RF.  Probably would be more akin to
semi-conductors than we might like.  As in diodes.  As in spur generator.

Terry N6RY pointed out that the rolls of chicken wire left large areas
"unprotected".  This is absolutely correct and IF they added a few more
rolls of wire to cover that uncovered area it would work even better.

Martin AA6E talked about circumferential wire in ground systems.  NEAR
the tower base, any conductor in any direction is supposed to be
beneficial to capture the RF current before it reaches the soil.  A few
degrees away from the radiator base the benefit becomes negligible and
possibly detrimental due to circulating currents.

I have worked on exactly 1ea AM broadcast ground system that used
circumferential wire in the ground system.  The radials were about 200ft
long with circular ties at 25, 50, 100, 150 and 200ft from the tower
base.  Whoever built this mess must have been hating life before it was
done.  My measurements indicate that not only was the circumferential
wire a waste...  It seemed to be a detriment to the smooth flow of RF
current to the tower base.

Again...  Something is better than nothing... but as Terry N6RY
observed, there are a lot of misconceptions, misunderstandings and plain
old junk science about ground systems and actually, vertical antennas in
general.

As I tell my clients...  Ground systems aren't rocket science.  As a
matter of fact, state of the art for vertical antenna technology was
achieved in the 1920's by engineers from RCA, Westinghouse, etc.
Methods of design and measurement have advanced tremendously in the 90
years since but the basic premise that Brown and others researched is
still mostly correct today.

Later,


Barry Sherwood wrote:
> Funny how real world and theory collide at times. I used a Hustler 5BTV with just a ground rod for several years with good results then switched to a Butternut HF6V with the stub tuned radial kit just laid out on top of sandy soil. It too worked well for my usage.
> 
> Barry Sherwood
> KF5GC
> 
> 
> --- On Sat, 11/14/09, K2RS <K2RSonline at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> From: K2RS <K2RSonline at comcast.net>
> Subject: Re: [Antennas] Radial Wires VS a wire or screen mesh
> To: 
> Cc: antennas at mailman.qth.net
> Date: Saturday, November 14, 2009, 8:20 PM
> 
> The contest station with the chicken-wire ground system for its 160 
> antennas is always near the top of the multi-multi category in major DX 
> contests and manages to rack up lots of Qs on 160 meters. So, while the 
> chicken wire might not be optimal, it works in the real world and, in 
> the end, that's all that really counts.
> 
> Jack   K2RS
> 
> Terry Conboy wrote:
>> This is probably fine as far as it goes.  The problem is that with only 
>> 4 rolls of chicken wire, there is still a lot of soil between the 
>> conductive mesh.  The idea of using a large number of wire radials is to 
>> provide a path for the RF displacement current back to the base of the 
>> antenna that only involves a very short distance for current flowing in 
>> the poorly conductive soil until it reaches a good conductor.
>>    
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-- 
Kevin C. Kidd, CSRE/AMD
WD4RAT
mailto:kkidd at kkbc.com

KK BROADCAST ENGINEERING
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