"Gene Fuller" wrote:
We would expect a very short coil to look like a straight wire, ...

There you go again. We are not talking about very short coils.
We are talking about big honking 75m bugcatcher coils. We
are talking about taking a 1/4WL self-resonant coil and cutting
it into two equal sized coils. The VF is not likely to change by
more than 10%.

How does the Vf transition to 0.02 for a resonant coil
occur? That transition is most certainly NOT shown in Fig. 1.

Of course it is shown. Draw a vertical line at 10^-3. The 10k
turns per lamda coil has a VF of 0.07. The 50 turns per lamda
has a VF of 0.86. Exactly the same principle applies to your
question.
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73, Cecil, W5DXP