RadioBanter - View Single Post

December 5th 04, 01:31 AM

In article ,
(Gary Weber) wrote:

I have a random wire antenna, which is a is a clothes line about 25
feet off the ground and about 45 feet long. This arrives at the deck
on my third floor flat, where I have a balun. I run the antenna to
the balun and a ground line from the balun to a copper rod in the
ground, and a coax feed line from the balun to the receiver.

This seems to work quite well as my signal strength improves somewhat,
but more importantly, my noise level drops dramatically when compared
to the whip on my small receiver.

I am confused about the "best" ground method. Should I place the
balun near the ground rod and run the coax feed line up into my flat?
Will this improve anything or, is the set up I have fine?

From your description of the situation your antenna is in you have an
approximately 25 foot wire to the ground rod. The 25 foot wire will act
as a counter poise against the 45 foot long horizontal wire depending on
how the BALUN is connected.

I would experiment with connecting and disconnecting the ground rod
connection at different frequencies to see which works better. If an
overall improvement is seen with the ground rod connected then you might
want to try making that path to the ground rod lower impedance by using
wide copper foil. This probably not worth the trouble though.

If your ground conductivity is poor then you might want to connect an
additional ground wire from the ground rod 45 foot long under your 45
foot long horizontal element.

If you do any of this let us know how things turn out.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California