On 27-Mar-2004, "John Smith" wrote:

Can I use a long wire at 6m with a random wire antenna tuner?
The wire is about 1/4 mile long, and off the ground about 6 foot,
(old electrified fence line on top of a fence)
Any Idea what the pattern would be? or if it would work?

Thanks

Take it with a grain of salt. Quick and dirty evaluation with EZNEC (Real MININEC ground, #10
Aluminum wire) shows 9.65 dBi at 10 deg elevation, vertical beamwidth of 2.7 deg., and horizontal
beamwidth of 11 deg. in the direction of the unfed end. I had to reduce the length to 1050 ft. to
keep the number of segments below EZNEC's limit of 500. I suspect that the gain and beamwidth would
not be much different at 1320 feet.

I just played around with the length trying to find a resonant point. Seems that as the length is
reduced, the resistive part of the feedpoint impedance changes from around 200 ohms to around 800
ohms while the reactive part is always negative. I placed the source at the bottom of a vertical
wire from ground to the horizontal wire. Other feedpoints might differ. Anyway, it looks like a
fairly high impedance feed.

So if you want a strong signal in the direction of the fence at 10 deg. elevation, it might be a
useful antenna. Other directions will suffer.

Ken Fowler, KO6NO