Just one caution about this. I don't think EZNEC or other NEC-based
programs will give accurate field strength any closer to a wire than a
few wire diameters. So it probably wouldn't be good for predicting the
likelihood of corona discharge and the like. It might be possible,
though, to model a wire as a number of very much smaller parallel wires
arranged in a circle, to get good field strength values closer to the
real wire. I wouldn't completely trust the results, though, until at
least a few test cases were run which could be compared to theoretical
values.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

K7ITM wrote:
Jim, K7JEB, wrote:
...

Again, this is just a special case of the general
problem. But it has a configuration that is easy to
implement in the EZNEC program and is quite
relevant to typical ham-radio, low-band dipole
installations.


It's also easy to get the electric field strength near the antenna from EZNEC.
I expect the field to be highest near wires, because of the shape the field
must take near the wires, so that's where I'd look first to get an idea about
possible breakdown of the air or insulators.

Cheers,
Tom