Art, KB9MZ wrote:
"---he has seen commercially were pock marked because of flashovers."

True. It mystified me that lightning preferred the Faraday screen to the
made for the purpose arc-gap across the base insulator. It may result
from impedance discontinuity. The surge impedance of the tower depends
on how skinny it is. The rigid rod connecting a tower to the "dog house"
network is at a certain height above the earth which gives the rod a Zo
as a single conductor transmission line, then this line connects with an
air-core solenoid returned to the earth to complete the circuit.

The coil must have a high reactance for some of the lightning`s spectrum
of energy, so it arcs across the gap between the coil and the grounded
Faraday screen. Once the arc is established, it is a low impedance from
d-c to daylight. The pock marks are deep and numerous.

A horizontal antenna reduces local noise because local signals and local
noise arrive at an angle almost parallel to the surface of the earth.
Propagation of horizontally polarized waves along the surface of the
earth is almost zero if the earth is a good conductor in the local area.
With good conductivity, incident and reflected waves are nearly equal in
strength. The reflection of a horizontally polarized wave is 180-degrees
out-of-phase with the incident wave. When these two waves, incident and
reflected waves arrive at a distant point, they nearly completely
cancel, as their path lengths are nearly equal too.

The bandwidth of standing wave antennas may be small when compared with
the frequency range allocated for an amateur band, but as compared with
the intermediate frequency passband of the receiver, the antenna
bandwidth is likely large. The Q of the antenna is lowered by radiation
resistance which is the antenna`s end product.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI