Don's idea for a loop with the backstay attached to the mast is GREAT! One thing that anyone who hasn't been around the ocean fails to really appreciate is just how H-A-R-D it is to keep insulators clean. There's a reason the big ships use humungous glass insulators everywhere, and even though they are usually way above the water line they salt up and turn into resistors almost overnight!
The horror stories of trying to those babies clean are all true. Salt can be tenacious stuff and it collects faster than bills on vacation. Any system that avoids the need to have insulator(s) in hard-to-reach places (like the top of the backstay) is worth considering. I bet the op who said a loop is a "short" is from the same school that told me that a linearly-loaded vertical using a helical element can't work because it's a huge "RF Choke"! Ron AC7AC -----Original Message----- ...actually the BEST antenna was to only insulate the bottom of the backstay and load the whole rig, AS DISCUSSED in the current editions of the ARRL Antenna Book. But I got tired of arguing with people that this would actually work - "But it is a short!" - as I was advocating it long before the Antenna Book, and gave up. And - in some cases it didn't work very well - on a ketch rig or with a "split" backstay. On a sloop, with a single wire from the mast to the stern - it is killer. In a lot of cases, we simply ran a 6 gauge wire back from the base of the mast or the forestay to the ground of the tuner and jumpered all the fitting toggles with wire for good continuity - forming a big "loop". The one insulator was because without it, there would be a lot of leakage from the chainplate at the feed point to ground after the stern gets coated with salt spray (but some installations worked OK without it anyway - Brian may recall Bill Parks' Islander 36 Stray Cat Blues about 2 or 3 races ago and his effort before that - Bill introduced the idea to me when he was interviewing me for an article in Latitude 38. It was in a book that was published some years ago on Ham Radio and Cruising and the author discussed not using insulators - at first I too said it wouldn't work - then I thought about it for a while). ...I am not saying other methods WON'T work - just that it is difficult to predict the results and it can be a tremendous amount of work and expense with poor results. One thing that has been determined is SOME sort of direct sea-water contact is needed. Don Melcher W6CZ HF Radio On Board www.hfradio.com _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: [email protected] You must be a subscriber to post to the list. Subscriber Info (Addr. Change, sub, unsub etc.): http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/subscribers.htm Elecraft web page: http://www.elecraft.com
