Dale Parfitt wrote:
wrote in message
...
Hi,

So I've spent months, rather years, carefully designing a new 5 band
cubical quad for myself. I've always known that I would use #12 solid
copper wire (not stranded), so that is what I used when running NEC2
to optimize this touchy antenna design (over millions of iterations).

Well, real world things are starting to happen. For wire, I've decided
what I would like to use is an enameled coated copperweld wire. I'll
buy the plain copperweld wire and coat it myself.

I think I would spend the extra money and buy copper wire. One nick in your
coating and the copper surface and the wire will disappear. If you must use
copperweld, try The Wireman or The RF Connection for copperweld that has a
high density black polyethylene jacket.

I would hate to spend all the time to design and build a quad and then have
the wire be the weakest link.

Dale W4OP



Dale
He already said he didn't want to use insulated wire because of the
weight of the insulation.
--
Tom Horne

"This alternating current stuff is just a fad. It is much too dangerous
for general use." Thomas Alva Edison

Scott, WU2X wrote:
"I`ve always known that I would use #12 solid copper wire (not stranded)
so that is what I used when running NEC2 to optimize this touchy antenna
design (over millions of iterations).

Bill Orr, W6SAI devotes Chapter 9 in "All About Cubical Quad Antennas"
to tuning and adjustment.

John Devoldere, ON4UN wrote on page 13-52 of the 2nd edition of
"Low-Band DXing:
"I designed the quad (for 80-m) with two quad loops of identical length
(for a 2 mm OD conductor or no.12 wire).

William I.(Bill)Orr, W6SAI wrote on page 77 of the 2nd edition of "All
About Cubical Quad Antennas";
'the individual gamma devices are made of #12 solid copper wire and a
small variable capacitor."

Ed Laport pictures a Wind Turbine Company insulator used for two wire
balanced lines on page 485 of "Radio Antenna engineering". These were
used in WW-2 Signal Corps fhombic antenna kits to support the 600-ohm
feedline. The wire was a cable made from (3) #12 twisted Copperweld
wires. This same cable also was used to make the rhombic curtain which
contained (3) of these Copperweld cables. I used many miles of this
cable and never saw a breakage in normal use despite years of aging in
all weather and the fact that we were using 100 KW in an antenna kit
designed for 5 KW. We did redesign the stainless steel dissipation lines
to withstand the high power. With new dissipation lines installed we got
many letters of complaint from South America from listeners who had
benefited from our bidirectional antennas which were intended to cover
central Europe only. Too bad, but other broadcasters claimed the target
area we were temporarily occupying in South America.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI

Ok, so I guess my subject line might have open the door to this
discussion. So NEC4 can model insulated wire, which seems like it
might be helpful for me. I see the price is down to 300$ now for US
non-commercial. Now if I can just get them to answer my email. So what
is included in the package - its not listed on the LLNL website. Does
NEC4 use the same input deck as NEC2? I assume there are maybe some
more input cards? What about the output?

I wrote my own cubical quad optimizing software that reads and writes
to the NEC2 input deck and reads the output directly - hopefully it
wouldn't require to much change to adapt it to use a NEC4 engine
instead.

-Scott, WU2X

With a few exceptions, NEC-4 and NEC-2 have the same input and output
format. NEC-4 has some additional 'card' types, such as the one for wire
insulation.

EZNEC programs can also model insulated wire. EZNEC+ is able to import
the wire coordinates (GW 'cards') from an NEC file.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

wrote:
Ok, so I guess my subject line might have open the door to this
discussion. So NEC4 can model insulated wire, which seems like it
might be helpful for me. I see the price is down to 300$ now for US
non-commercial. Now if I can just get them to answer my email. So what
is included in the package - its not listed on the LLNL website. Does
NEC4 use the same input deck as NEC2? I assume there are maybe some
more input cards? What about the output?

I wrote my own cubical quad optimizing software that reads and writes
to the NEC2 input deck and reads the output directly - hopefully it
wouldn't require to much change to adapt it to use a NEC4 engine
instead.

-Scott, WU2X

wrote:
Ok, so I guess my subject line might have open the door to this
discussion. So NEC4 can model insulated wire, which seems like it
might be helpful for me. I see the price is down to 300$ now for US
non-commercial. Now if I can just get them to answer my email. So what
is included in the package - its not listed on the LLNL website. Does
NEC4 use the same input deck as NEC2? I assume there are maybe some
more input cards? What about the output?

yes.. input is basically the same as NEC2, as is the output. A few new
cards (catenaries, for instance)




I wrote my own cubical quad optimizing software that reads and writes
to the NEC2 input deck and reads the output directly - hopefully it
wouldn't require to much change to adapt it to use a NEC4 engine
instead.

Almost none.



-Scott, WU2X