Mike, others have given what I consider good advice on several of the points you asked about. I'll take a crack at your question about Moxon's counterpoise advice. I'm slowly going through Moxon's book. Its fascinating reading, by the way, for those looking for new antenna ideas or new ways of looking at old antennas. But his writing style isn't always very clear and easy to comprehend. And some of his "contraptions" with multiple feedlines coming into the shack seem overly complicated to me. But, all in all, I still recommend the book.
His point about the conventional ground plane with 3 or 4 sloping counterpoise wires goes as follows. The assumption that all 3 CP wires will carry equal current is bogus. Since they all vary slightly in length or in coupling to surrounding objects, their impedance as seen at the feedpoint will also vary widely. The net result is that one of them will take a large percentage of the current while the others will be mostly ineffectual, and the hoped for symmetrical pattern will not in fact occur. To obtain the desired symmetry, he suggests using CP wires cut to less than 1/4 WL (even substantially less) and then putting an inductance between the common feedpoint of the CP wires and the return side of the feedline. This inductance is then adjusted to obtain resonance of the CP wires at the operating frequency. This way, they will share the RF current much more equally. I have not tried this approach, but it seems to make sense to me. Another point he and others make, that I can confirm from experience, is that 3 or 4 CP wires and a symmetrical pattern really aren't needed in practice anyhow. I use a BuddiPole in a vertical arrangement with one sloping CP wire per band and it works just fine and seems to work stations in all directions without a problem. I don't have his book in front of me right now, but somewhere in it is a nice table or graph that compares ground plane performance vs. number of CP wires, and hardly anything is lost by reducing the number. 73 ... Craig AC0DS _______________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Post to: Elecraft@mailman.qth.net 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