If indeed that carbon fibre is conductive, and he claims he is getting
outstanding results whilst operating stationery mobile, then what is
happening?

I would appreciate comments.
73.
John
VK2KC

I can tell you my experience with an about 7.5-meter carbon-fibre fishing rod,
that I was intending to use as support for a 10-MHz vertical (the rod was
secured to an insulated support, with some radials lying on the ground).

What is did is to run a bare copper wire along the rod, fixing it to the rod
every 30cm or so using scotch tape. So, the antenna was the wire, and the rod
was just a support.

After tuning the wire for perfect resonance at 10.1 MHz, I applied 1kW RF power
to the antenna. The result was that the rod (and the tape) got quickly burned at
most of the points where the wire was fixed to the rod (the high-voltage
points).

It can be easily concluded that:

- the carbon-fire rod is indeed conductive
- its resistance is however too high for plainly using it as a radiator
(i.e.without the copper wire)
- even though running low power one would probably not experience the problems I
had, the antenna loss (in dB) caused to the fairly high rod resistivity would
anyway be significant, independently of whether one runs low or high power.

73

Tony I0JX
Rome, Italy