Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada How many of you are amateur radio operators?

I'm not so good on antenna theory, was thinking of an unbalanced antenna like a vertical. Since the ground makes up the other half of the antenna I would suppose a steeply sloping yard would be a problem. Think of a ground plane on the roof after a wind storm. There are rapidly diminishing returns with increased number of radials. This has been well studied to optimize commercial installations. I don't remember how many, probably in the ARRL antenna book. Was the text I grabbed first. Sounds like a plan for the beam if you have decent conductivity, enough to keep currents off the tower. That would screw up the pattern like an extra extremely weird element.

Used to dream of all kinds of HF antennas, half zepp, rhombic, etc. But kept coming back to verticals. Particularly an array I could switch from the shack. Sort of an electrically steerable vertical beam with that extremely low radiation angle.

What would really be cool would be to get strapped to a man carrying kite and operate from aloft. Why lift just the antenna?