On Thu, 2 Sep 2004 14:27:37 +0000 (UTC), "Reg Edwards"
wrote:

Incidentally, ground loss is not only smaller in sea water, it is also
smaller with soil resistivities of several thousand ohms and greater.
There's a maximum somewhere in between.

Hi George,

The statement above falls into the category of "Old Wives' Tales."
Given the choice for conductors, Sea Water ranks 6 or 7 orders of
magnitude in worse conductivity than any metal (or even carbon) you
would care to pick. By this logic, you should do everything in your
power to operate in an open pit coal mine. ;-)

We won't go into the egregious error of soil resistivity for the same
reasons of senior matriarchal fabrications.

The "legendary" characteristic of Sea Water is found in its far field
reflective characteristic which is remarkable, due largely to its huge
SWR to fields (the same SWR that would occur with the supposed several
thousand ohms of soil). That small boats use a patch on the bottom of
the keel to offer a counterpoise to RF simply exhibits how little
ground development is necessary when the huge asset of reflectivity
dominates this large loss of a poor ground connection (you should also
note the ironic application of "ground" in this regard).

To crudely estimate ground loss, download program RADIALS2 from website
below. It's all crammed into only 70 kilo-bytes. Nobody has yet complained
it gives the wrong answers.

For that matter, no one has even offered it works! Principally
because it places the onus on you proving one of two things:
1. it does work;
2. it does not work.
How can you tell? ;-)

You would stand a better chance with such forecasts using the old
Magic 8-Ball which would at least offer the occasional honest answer
like "Can't answer right now, try again."

Punchinello,

So, old man, tell us when you are going to offer any substantive
method that gives numbers to these illusions of ground you offer? The
soil of your back garden, much less Britain hardly are representative
of a much greater continental expanses beyond that little island you
occupy. The examples of your erroneous generalizations against
reality would be instructive if you simply expanded (embarrassingly
perhaps) on your kitchen calculations of mud calibration. After all,
its been simply YEARS since you offered such suggestions to no obvious
Kelvinian payoff.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC