Mark -
Verticals do work and don't take much space.
The better the ground (I like to roll out fence wire, then cover with dirt
and seed with grass cover.), the better the vertical works. Verts are not
that good for short skip (stateside QSOs), but the further out the DX, the
better verticals work with their natural low angle of radiation (that can
also get into telephones and VCRs). In Ohio days, I used a 44 ft wide
40-meter horizontal monopole (HyGain) on a 40 ft tower. It worked short skip
and DX very well, without the interference problems of a vertical, and
without an RF-hot tower to keep the kids off of. For 80m, I loaded up 30 ft
of insulated tower sections, with some TV mast on top of it (almost a full
1/4 wave), and could work what I could hear. With added coil loading it did
a good job on 160m, but had some high voltage at the base (with the KW on)
that burned up my first base insulators. (Not a good antenna, if kids can
touch it.) Since my move to NC, I'm using a GP - kind of messy, but
probably more efficient than an earth ground for the vertical. (For the
horizontal dipole, the ground is just to give lightning a place to go -
without coming into the house; for the vertical, the ground is half the
antenna and needs to be more than a long ground rod.)

AK


"Mark Sheffield" wrote in message
...

Hi Tom - I have a suburban Denver/Boulder lot, about a third of an
acre. I'm not only up against a space problem, but don't have a tree
higher than 35 ft. and then there's the XYL..... - M

On Fri, 29 Aug 2003 17:32:04 -0400, "Tom Coates"
wrote:

How much acreage do you have?

Tom, N3IJ


"MarkS" wrote in message
. com...
With the downturn in the solar cycle and worse days ahead, I'm faced
with operating on the lower hf bands. 20M has gotten to be very hit
or miss wrt propagation and it seems that more and more dx is
happening on 40 (with some on 30). I have a 40M dipole up about 30 ft
or so, but that really doesn't cut it.

I know that this is like a discussion about "what's the best color",
but what antenna systems will work well on 40M, maybe even 80M, that I
could mount either on the ground or up no higher than 30 ft? I need
to at least get some general direction on this from an experiential
data set rather than starting with the ads in QST or CQ.

Tnx - Mark Sheffield/N0LF