Reminds me of the cartoon of the lineman whose job changed to running
underground service - he said the hardest part was getting the holes deep
enough to bury the power poles.
You got a lot of good advice already - I vote for bare copper - and use the
ground rod and its ground clamp as a solderless lug to distribute the buried
ground wires.

"Bob Miller" wrote in message
...
I can't find this in any of my books, so thought I ask the group:

For my general station ground, I have a copper pipe that goes down
about one foot -- then hits rock or limestone or whatever.

I'd like to enhance the pipe with a few buried radials. I happen to
have a 500' roll of 14-guage stranded *insulated* copper wire. Will
the insulation keep the wire from becoming "one with the dirt"?

Or should I go buy some bare solid copper wire?

Tnx,

Bob
k5qwg



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My server will not download the reply I made to this post. Ater new posts
appeared and mine did not, I resent (twice). I understand they all did post,
and I apologize for resending what was already there. If anyone knows what
setting could be casuing them to be invisible (to me) I would appreciate
learning how to fix it. Even deleting the entire group and downloading all
headers and message bodies did not show my posts in this thread.

Best regards, and maybe someone could reply to this invisible-to-me post,
LOL.

Jack

On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:52:18 -0400, "Jack Painter"
wrote:

My server will not download the reply I made to this post. Ater new posts
appeared and mine did not, I resent (twice). I understand they all did post,
and I apologize for resending what was already there. If anyone knows what
setting could be casuing them to be invisible (to me) I would appreciate
learning how to fix it. Even deleting the entire group and downloading all
headers and message bodies did not show my posts in this thread.

Best regards, and maybe someone could reply to this invisible-to-me post,
LOL.

Jack


All your posts showed up this afternoon/evening (Monday). Been looking
at your website on grounding. Very informative.

thanks,

bob
k5qwg

Jack Painter wrote:
My server will not download the reply I made to this post. Ater new posts
appeared and mine did not, I resent (twice). I understand they all did post,
and I apologize for resending what was already there. If anyone knows what
setting could be casuing them to be invisible (to me) I would appreciate
learning how to fix it. Even deleting the entire group and downloading all
headers and message bodies did not show my posts in this thread.

Best regards, and maybe someone could reply to this invisible-to-me post,
LOL.

Jack

Everything depends on your news server. When you post a message it is
cued for posting with all the other current postings. Depending on how
busy the server is, it may not be able to process new postings until it
expires a bunch of old ones, to make space. Then it processes latest
postings and sends it's information off to other servers for posting.
The other servers have the same thing to deal with. If they are busy
they may even refuse a packet of postings and your server would have
to try again later.

My news server is somewhat local to me and I see my postings within
a few seconds of posting. But there are some news servers where I won't
be able to see my post show up for 6 or 7 hours. Google groups is like
this.

I just take it on faith that my posting got out. Even when I see it on
my news server, I have no idea when it will reach any of the other
servers.

--
Martin E. Meserve

http://www.k7mem.150m.com

Bob, K5QWG wrote:
"Or should I go buy some bare solid copper wire?"

Depends on frequency. As a path for electricity, the earth is like a
leaky capacitor or a good capacitor in parallel with a resistance.

Terman says on page 807 of his 1955 edition:
"At broadcast (550-1600 KHz) and lower frequencies the ratio of
capacitive reactance of the earth to the earth resitivity (sigma
reciprocal=1/conductivity) is considerably greater than unity, so to a
first approximation the earth can be considered as purely
resistive.----Conversely at frequencies of the order of 10 MHz and
greater, the impedance represented by ground (not sea water) is
primarily capacitive, and ground-wave attenuation at a given physical
distance is determined by the factor of frequency divided by the
dielectric constant plus 1."

So for low frequencies use bare wire. For high frequencies, you won`t
notice insulation on your radials, electrically.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI