On Tue, 07 Sep 2010 09:32:53 -0700, Jim Lux
wrote:

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.

60 feet is not in the league of 140 meters or the shorter 50 meters.

However, to other comments, keeping it a column of water instead of
spray would certainly add to the pump load.

You can recover the energy in the water coming back down.

Something like Hero's fountain? The proportions of this is growing by
leaps and bounds.

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.

Which argues why not fill the tube with a tape measure instead?

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.

The surrounding technology, literally, is the ferrite ring enclosing
the column. In 1960's dollars, cheaper perhaps but nothing newer. And
cheaper is relative - not particularly affordable.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC