On Sunday, February 10, 2013 9:14:32 AM UTC-6, Ralph Mowery wrote:

When the lower radials were added the Ringo was suspose to work much beter.

By that time, the Ringo had fallen out of favor around here so I do not know

how well they worked. Main thing is that adding the radials defeated the

purpose of the antenna, which was to eliminate the radials.

Well maybe as far as the standard Ringo, which is a half wave.
But the Ringo Ranger was a dual 5/8 collinear. Seems to me that
design was used more to get more gain vs the shorter antennas,
rather than trying to avoid radials.

When it first came out, decoupling from the feed line was not
given too much consideration, at least for lower cost amateur
antennas.. And most that used it, thought it did OK. Likely
because they had nothing better to compare to, or the feed line
lengths, mounting, did not skew that pattern as bad in some
cases, as it did others. The amount of skewing will vary some
in each installation. It was pretty bad in my case.

But then the Isopole came out.. And the roof caved in. lol..
The Isopole was so much better performing than the regular
Ringo Ranger, that Cushcraft had no choice but to add some
method of decoupling to their antenna, if they wanted to
continue to sell many of them.
So they added the lower 50 inches of coax, and a set of
1/4 wave radials at the bottom of that length of coax, which
was grounded at that point, to the mast supporting the antenna.

The decoupling section helped greatly, and saved Cushcraft
from certain VHF vertical sales ruination.
It was still slightly inferior to the method the Isopole
used, but close enough to keep them in the game.
Many preferred the RR2 because it was a bit less ugly than
the Isopole. And maybe a bit cheaper, but I can't remember
how they were priced at the time.

The only band I ever used a 1/2 wave Ringo, was on 10m.
And I ended up adding a Cushcraft type decoupling section
to it. It worked very well. But the 5/8 antennas I used
were better still.. But I didn't use 1/4 wave radials like
most do with 5/8 ground planes. At that time, I used 3/4
wave radials, and the antenna doubled as an appx 1/4 GP
on 30m.