Richard Clark wrote:
On Mon, 6 Sep 2010 02:56:49 -0700 (PDT), Richard Fry
wrote:

interesting concept for an antenna:

"How's my signal?"

"You've got a strong signal in, 5X5."

....this through a repeater - DUH.

An HF antenna would need to put up a water stream "about 60 feet."

Hmmm, about 3kPa for each foot of water or about 200kPa. At Walmart,
for $320 you can buy a pump with a 2HP motor to do the job:
230V @ 11.2A


Takes a lot more HP to make a free flowing fountain that high.
Jet d'Eau in Geneva is 500 liter/sec with 2 500kW pumps (of course it is
140 meters tall)..(And yes, it is very impressive from a distance..)

The Buckingham fountain in Chicago is shorter (ca 50 meters) and has
much lower power pumps: 75,190 and 250 HP

2.5KW to erect the antenna for a 100W HF rig. If you stacked 50 HF
rigs (end to end for more length), you would have both the same size
antenna, plus ALL of the 2.5KW of power going to RF and not water.

You can recover the energy in the water coming back down. If you have a
tube, you can either just feed the conductive fluid up the tube and fill
it (a sort of liquid SteppIR vertical), or, for fixed height, you could
have a recirculation.

This isn't particularly new or novel, by the way. The idea has been
around for decades (I think I saw some papers from the 60s analyzing
it). What's new is that the surrounding technology might have changed,
and what was impractical back then might be more practical now.