On Sun, 03 Jan 2010 14:19:05 -0600, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

Burying anything out there is harder work than
sinking a ground rod. I think I'm going to have to take my chances.

Consider the significance of "shallow" inches, not feet; and sometimes
barely beneath the surface if you have to. If you don't have to (no
trip hazards to worry about) on the surface is equally suitable. You
don't need bare wire, but you can use it - it doesn't matter.

Radials need only be as long as your vertical is high. 16 to a couple
of dozen are sufficient.

Even if I add a little salt water or dilute acid to accelerate that? This is
something I've been considering..

Don't go there. Curing takes years and is an issue of soil
compaction.

By choking the feedline, do you mean
placing ferrite slugs round it like those used on VDU cables? That's
something else that will be cheap and easy to test empirically.

That is exactly one very good solution. You need to research the
appropriate ferrite mix which is frequency specific when we are
talking about huge swaths of LF to HF coverage.

There looks like one difference. Any signal hitting a coax screen if used in
this scheme will have a corresponding return current in the core wire,

This one statement exposes a very large problem in understanding about
the physics of coaxial cable.

The equality of nature in each half of a twin wire appeals
to me, so long as it actually works. Should be cheap and easy to test that
one...

Actually, it is harder than you might imagine at first glance. Yes,
the methods are simple, but getting past preconceived notions is the
single greatest hurdle. Many engineers are ill suited to the task.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC