On Monday, March 3, 2014 2:28:21 AM UTC-6, gareth wrote:

Just hooking some braid to the antenna won't do anything.



Yes it will, taken together with the mass of the vehicle, as I suggested.

It's possible that connecting to the RV may improve performance
due to the antenna becoming a perverted dipole of sorts.
But as a means of lowering ground losses under a vertical, your
solution will prove to be quite poor.
But that it would actually act like a dipole seems fairly remote
to me.

And there is something that seems to confuse people about
short verticals used on vehicles and such. And I think could
also be applied to short verticals on tripods.
I've fairly much proven to myself that varying the length of the
metal on the ground side of the vertical usually does not convert
it to a different length dipole. Per say..

If this were the case, I would have to modify and re-tune my
mobile whips every time I changed to a different size vehicle,
or added other metal to the vehicle.
If the antenna acted as a dipole, I would expect to need to re-tune
in every change of vehicle or mount.
This does not happen.
These short verticals are still acting like verticals on the ground,
with varying numbers of radials, or metal mass, not perverted dipoles
slightly above the ground.

My mobile antennas are still resonant at the same frequency no matter
what vehicle they are on, big or small, and no change if I add extra
radial wires to the vehicle, or even connect directly to the ocean,
which I have done in the real world when parked next to the Gulf of
Mexico.

What does this tell me? That the metal under a mobile whip is
acting a lot more like a radial system, or even the ground itself,
than the other half of a physical dipole.

So what else does that tell me? That connecting a braid from
a tripod mounted short vertical to an RV is likely to not pan
out too well as far as reducing ground loss under the vertical.
In fact, I predict it to be fairly useless.