On Monday, January 27, 2014 6:03:19 PM UTC-6, Ralph Mowery wrote:

If you are in an area that is very flat your results may be differant.

The area around here is real flat. The 5/8 was always the best
when we compared them. They were the best at low angles at long
distances, and gave less picket fencing when driving around town
for some reason.
Back then I was using a Larson, and it was on the center of the roof.
But these days I have simple 1/4 wave whips on the trucks.
I'm not as picky these days about 2m, and they hit less stuff overhead,
being they are also mounted on the roof of the cabs, which sits fairly
high.

When comparing all the various vertical types on 10m at the house,
the 5/8 ground plane always beat the 1/4 wave, and 1/2 waves I tried.
And the half wave was decoupled, and did work very well.
But.. The 5/8 beat it quite noticeably on distant local paths where
the angles used are very low.

Now, when I tried 5/8 ground planes on 2m, they were horrible if
you used 1/4 wave radials. So in that case, the problems did show up.
But if I used 5/8 lower elements and rigged it as a collinear, it
did fine.

Anyway, in the cases I tried with the whips on the vehicle roofs,
the 5/8 seemed to work pretty well. But a vehicle is larger than
the 1/4 wave radials which did not work well.
I've always felt a 5/8 element should really be paired with another
5/8 element as a collinear. That is a very good antenna if decoupled
from the feedline.

So you never really know for sure about the 5/8's until you try them
in each case.
I've heard many prefer the shorter 1/4 wave whips if in a valley
with the repeaters up on nearby mountains and such.
But Houston is not really like that and the 5/8's usually won
if mounted on decent metal.