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Ground conductivity's effect on vertical
Roy,
This is blowing my mind. What you said about ground loss peaking at some certain conductivity makes perfect sense but I never thought about it before as applied to a vertical antenna system like this. Sure enough, I found a maximum. This is wild. We always think, "The better the ground, the better the antenna system," but it's not that simple. It's funny to think that really terrible ground can have an advantage over pretty good ground. Next I'm going to play with the radial length so I can see the other effect you described for me. Regards, Al W6LX "Roy Lewallen" wrote in message news4CdnVoHG_g30pXVnZ2dnUVZ_vudnZ2d@easystreeton line... Al Lorona wrote: Hi, Everybody, In the process of modeling a vertical antenna (specifically, I am using EZNEC 5.0) I am noticing an effect I did not expect which could be the result of a modeling error on my part. The antenna is a 34-foot vertical above (12) 34-foot radials, making it a 1/4 wave on 40 and a 1/2 wave on 20. On 40, the antenna works as I expected; as the ground conductivity goes up, the gain and efficiency of the antenna both increase, too. But on 20, if I increase the ground conductivity from, say, 0.005 to 0.008 S/m, the max gain and efficiency *decrease*! This is counter-intuitive to me. Can anyone point to something I'm doing wrong? Thanks, Al W6LX Ground loss is a sort of impedance matching problem. If you have perfectly conducting ground, there is no ground loss. If you have perfectly insulating ground, there is no ground loss. There's always some ground conductivity in between those extremes at which the loss is maximum. This value depends on the frequency among other things. Try a wider range of conductivities and you'll find this point. You should also be aware that if you have radials which are above but close to the ground, half wavelength ones can be considerably less efficient than quarter wavelength ones. One reason is that the points of maximum current are out near the centers of the radials, where they induce current into the lossy ground. When the radials are a quarter wavelength or shorter, the current maxima are near the center, so their fields nearly cancel. Another often-overlooked fact is that radials very close to the ground are electrically considerably longer than when more elevated. So radials which are a quarter wavelength in free space can have their current maxima well out from the center which results in lower efficiency. Roy Lewallen, W7EL |
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