Reg Edwards wrote:
Roy, you have anticipated my thoughts on the subject.

Nevertheless, I will do some calculations.

You should be able to reason the wire-over-ground case as follows:

Imagine a plane wave of 2 V/m intensity striking a 2 m long open
circuited dipole in free space. The open circuit voltage should be 4
times as great as it would be for a 1 V/m wave striking a 1 m long
dipole. If you bisect the system with a ground plane, you have half the
dipole and half the field above ground -- that's a 1 m wire and 1 V/m
field. And half the original dipole's voltage appears between the bottom
end of the wire and ground. So the resulting voltage is twice what it
would be at the center of a 1 m dipole in free space.

The proof of the pudding lies in the type of computer programs whose
input data does not depend on unreliabe human imagination about
antenna gain, mirror images and reflections from the ground.

I have no idea what you're talking about there, but I'm sure that
whatever it is, it must not apply to the programs you write.

I have no access to the learned text books or computer programs.

Sure you do, as does anyone with access to this newsgroup. Texts are
readily available by web order for the price of a very few bottles of
mediocre wine. Some have even been scanned and posted on the web. And
NEC-2 is free and can be downloaded from the web. But some people just
can't deal with any idea they didn't come up with on their own -- we
call it the NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. But each to his own.

Enjoy tonight's Balanis. You can save the Kraus for a special occasion.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL