Phasing Verticals
 

A friend of mine is shunt feeding his 80 foot tower on
75 meters. He asked me if he could install another shorter (35 ft)
inductively loaded vertical 1/4 wave away from the tower
and phase them to favor Europe. I was not sure. Will two unequal
physically, but resonate, vertical antennas have the same low angle of
radiation as two that are equal in size? My thought is that they may
have some kind of directivity, but not as low an angle as equal ones.
Yes, there will be a good system of ground radials.

John / K1BXI

Phasing Verticals
 

"John Phillips" wrote in message
news:CGq2h.4900$B44.474@trndny07...
A friend of mine is shunt feeding his 80 foot tower on
75 meters. He asked me if he could install another shorter (35 ft)
inductively loaded vertical 1/4 wave away from the tower
and phase them to favor Europe. I was not sure. Will two unequal
physically, but resonate, vertical antennas have the same low angle of
radiation as two that are equal in size? My thought is that they may have
some kind of directivity, but not as low an angle as equal ones. Yes,
there will be a good system of ground radials.

John / K1BXI

Hi John

Have you considered trying to model the antenna with EZNEC?
Antenna modeling scared me because I'm not bright. But EZNEC is quite
understandable and easy to use.

Jerry

Phasing Verticals
 

John, phasing two electrically different driven, shunt fed towers is
not a task for the beginner... It is done by technically experienced
hams (and there are a number on here who can do it in their sleep) and
by broadcast professionals...
However, simply adding a tower 1/8 wave away, loading it to tune~3%
below the operating frequency and having it act as a parasitic
reflector is really quite simple... This is what I recommend you and
your buddy consider... Top hat load the tower and use the inductor
between the top of the tower and the hat as the final adjustment to the
tuning... Use a field strength meter to get the tuning correct...

denny / k8do

John Phillips wrote:
A friend of mine is shunt feeding his 80 foot tower on
75 meters. He asked me if he could install another shorter (35 ft)
inductively loaded vertical 1/4 wave away from the tower
and phase them to favor Europe. I was not sure. Will two unequal
physically, but resonate, vertical antennas have the same low angle of
radiation as two that are equal in size? My thought is that they may
have some kind of directivity, but not as low an angle as equal ones.
Yes, there will be a good system of ground radials.

John / K1BXI

Phasing Verticals
 

Denny wrote:
John, phasing two electrically different driven, shunt fed towers is
not a task for the beginner... It is done by technically experienced
hams (and there are a number on here who can do it in their sleep) and
by broadcast professionals...
However, simply adding a tower 1/8 wave away, loading it to tune~3%
below the operating frequency and having it act as a parasitic
reflector is really quite simple... This is what I recommend you and
your buddy consider... Top hat load the tower and use the inductor
between the top of the tower and the hat as the final adjustment to the
tuning... Use a field strength meter to get the tuning correct...

denny / k8do

John Phillips wrote:
A friend of mine is shunt feeding his 80 foot tower on
75 meters. He asked me if he could install another shorter (35 ft)
inductively loaded vertical 1/4 wave away from the tower
and phase them to favor Europe. I was not sure. Will two unequal
physically, but resonate, vertical antennas have the same low angle of
radiation as two that are equal in size? My thought is that they may
have some kind of directivity, but not as low an angle as equal ones.
Yes, there will be a good system of ground radials.

John / K1BXI

Perhaps I didn't explain it correctly: What he wants to do is set up 1/4
wave in front of his shunt fed tower that is tuned to resonate say at
3.8MHz, another 1/4 wave vertical on a line toward Europe and feed it
with a 90 degree phasing line. This is not rocket science for two equal
size verticals.

The shunt fed tower is slightly over 100 degrees long physically and the
second vertical is about 45 degrees long physically, inductively loaded
to 90 degrees long.

Will these two unequal in size, but resonated to the same frequency,
verticals behave the same as if they were both the same physical size ?

Phasing Verticals
 

Short answer, no...
Long answer, yes...

And I cannot do a long answer justice here on a forum such as this...
Perhaps W7EL or W2DU will jump in here and rescue me...
The major issue you face is that the towers are shunt loaded which
creates phase differences between the two right from the git-go, even
when both are resonated... The fact that the feed points of the two
towers are initially out of phase needs to be tuned out in setting up
the 90 degree total phase difference...

Certainly it can be done... You will need to measure the input
impedence and reactance for each tower as built...It will take a
pick-up coil on each tower fed to an oscilloscope so that you can see
the phase difference as you adjust the phasing network / phasing lines
to reach the desired 90 degrees phase lag on the leading element...
Read W7EL's contribution to the ARRL Antenna Handbook on the subject of
properly phasing lines / antennas... This will give you enough
information to decide if you want to proceed...

I long ago decided life is too short for designing all driven arrays
when I can build, install, and tune, parasitic arrays in less time than
it takes me to work the equations for designing the needed phasing
networks for a driven array...

denny / k8do

Phasing Verticals
 

It's easy to see who's read Chapter 8 of the ARRL Antenna Book and who
hasn't! Denny has the right idea.

What you need to do in order to get a decent front/back ratio from the
two elements is to create equal amplitude and correctly phased fields
from them. If one is shorter than the other, it needs to get more
current to produce the same field as the longer one. The current at the
feedpoint of a shunt fed tower isn't equal in either magnitude or phase
to the current in the tower itself. So adjusting the feedpoint currents
for some relative magnitude and phase won't get you the right tower
currents unless you've accounted for the transformation.

It's much easier to get 2 - 3 dB gain than to get good f/b ratio -- you
can goof up the current magnitude and phasing pretty badly and still get
noticeable gain in about the right direction. (In a way it's too bad
this is true, because a lot of people see some gain and assume it means
that they've got the phasing they planned, when in reality they're way
off. Then they extend this misinformation to other arrays and can't
figure out why they don't work.) But with the setup you've described, it
would be easy to be far enough off that you wouldn't get the gain,
either, at least not in the expected direction.

It can be done, but as Denny says, it's much more complicated than just
using a 90 degree "phasing line" as another poster suggested. That
approach generally doesn't work for even the simplest of cases (see the
Antenna Book for the reasons), and it certainly won't work here. What I
would do is model the elements without the shunt feed system and adjust
the base currents in the model (by putting current sources at the bases)
to get the desired pattern. Then I'd make an adjustable feed system like
the L network feed described in the Antenna Book or one of the other
systems described in _Low-Band DXing_. Then I'd arrange some sort of
current probes at the tower bases and adjust the currents to match the
model currents. A final adjustment could be made by putting a signal
source or detector to the rear of the array and adjusting for the best
null. If you do everything just right, you'll get right at 3 dB gain
over a single element and a very good null directly to the rear.

A parasitic array is an option, but again I'd model it. You have the
same problem of getting the right element currents, but now the only
adjustment you can make is the parasitic tower's resonant frequency. You
might have trouble getting enough current in the short tower to do you
much good. A second problem with the parasitic array approach is that
any ground loss will eat you alive. Even what you consider to be a good
ground system might not be adequate, especially for the short element.
Be sure to include a realistic amount of ground system loss in any model
you make.

Alternatively, you can just connect the towers together through some
sort of arbitrary feed system (or you can carefully cut a "phasing line"
-- you have the same probability of success with either method) and have
lots of fun seeing in which directions it seems to work well and which
it doesn't.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Denny wrote:
Short answer, no...
Long answer, yes...

And I cannot do a long answer justice here on a forum such as this...
Perhaps W7EL or W2DU will jump in here and rescue me...
The major issue you face is that the towers are shunt loaded which
creates phase differences between the two right from the git-go, even
when both are resonated... The fact that the feed points of the two
towers are initially out of phase needs to be tuned out in setting up
the 90 degree total phase difference...

Certainly it can be done... You will need to measure the input
impedence and reactance for each tower as built...It will take a
pick-up coil on each tower fed to an oscilloscope so that you can see
the phase difference as you adjust the phasing network / phasing lines
to reach the desired 90 degrees phase lag on the leading element...
Read W7EL's contribution to the ARRL Antenna Handbook on the subject of
properly phasing lines / antennas... This will give you enough
information to decide if you want to proceed...

I long ago decided life is too short for designing all driven arrays
when I can build, install, and tune, parasitic arrays in less time than
it takes me to work the equations for designing the needed phasing
networks for a driven array...

denny / k8do

Phasing Verticals
 

Roy Lewallen wrote:
It's easy to see who's read Chapter 8 of the ARRL Antenna Book and who
hasn't! Denny has the right idea.

Thanks K8DO and W7EL you fellows have answered my questions and made me
realize that the one word that I was missing in all of this was
"current". Strange how one word can turn on the light bulb. I need to
get an updated Antenna Book, my old dog eared one is vintage 1965. Also
EZNEC wouldn't hurt either. I'll try the demo first even though it means
having to use Windows (I'm a Linux user). Thanks again.

John / K1BXI

Phasing Verticals
 

John Phillips wrote:

Thanks K8DO and W7EL you fellows have answered my questions and made me
realize that the one word that I was missing in all of this was
"current". Strange how one word can turn on the light bulb. I need to
get an updated Antenna Book, my old dog eared one is vintage 1965. Also
EZNEC wouldn't hurt either. I'll try the demo first even though it means
having to use Windows (I'm a Linux user). Thanks again.

John / K1BXI


Hint hint Roy. There are a lot of us out here that use only, or almost
only, Linux.

That being said, is anyone running EZNEC under WINE?

tom
K0TAR

Phasing Verticals
 

Tom Ring wrote:

Hint hint Roy. There are a lot of us out here that use only, or almost
only, Linux.

The "lot" comprises about 5% of the total market at the outside. Are you
willing to pay 20 times as much for EZNEC as Windows users?

That being said, is anyone running EZNEC under WINE?

At last report, EZNEC won't run under Wine. Wine malfunctions a couple
of places when attempting to run EZNEC, although I think I could
probably work around them. (Of course, there's always the danger that an
update or upgrade would break the program again, since there's no way I
know of to find out which Windows functions Wine emulates correctly and
which it doesn't.) I won't, however, make any attempt to work around the
Wine problems until Wine is able to open the manual, which it is wasn't
able to do at the last report I got. The manual was created with
RoboHelp, a popular help authoring tool, and there isn't any way for me
to work around Wine's inability to read it. If and when anyone reports
that Wine has advanced to where it's able to open the manual (EZW4.hlp),
I'll look again at the possibility of finding workarounds to Wine's
other problems with EZNEC.

EZNEC works fine under at least one Mac emulator, SoftWindows.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Phasing Verticals
 

Roy Lewallen wrote:

Tom Ring wrote:


Hint hint Roy. There are a lot of us out here that use only, or
almost only, Linux.


The "lot" comprises about 5% of the total market at the outside. Are you
willing to pay 20 times as much for EZNEC as Windows users?


I would gladly pay double without a blink, and I doubt that it would be
that much work, in the long run, to make a Linux version. Your SW and
your call obviously, but you are making a very wrong assumption that
porting a version that runs under a different OS takes nearly the same
development effort.

I would gladly assist in making it work. I have no idea what language
it is written in, but as long as it is not in something MS specific it
shouldn't be that hard to port.

tom
K0TAR