Using #10 bare wire is fine. If that's what you have on hand to use (free of incremental cost), then by all means use it. It certainly will NOT hurt anything. There are physical reasons for "bare" and minimizing wire loss reasons for #12. Bare #10 violates neither of those.
The FCP is a folding trick to severely reduce net RF fields down at the dirt and reduce losses. We're not trying to make some kind of a feedline with it where to get a certain Z a wire size changes forces changes in spacing. The actual single-ended feed Z of an FCP varies quite a bit from installation to installation. That is expected and normal. Never adjust FCP dimensions to affect changes in overall feedpoint Z or SWR. We tried that a long time ago (historical category: Jack's and Guy's dumb mistakes). Abject failure. Screws up the reduction of net RF fields down at the dirt and quickly raises loss, fouling the reason for the FCP in the first place. The orientation of the FCP with respect to the horizontal part of the L is pretty much immaterial with respect to pattern or efficiency. Changing the co-orientation angle will move the feed Z around some. But since an efficient L over FCP will expose all the natural variability of an inverted L's feed Z, you will have to deal with that natural variability, which is far more than the variability caused by the angle between the FCP and the horizontal. Hope that has helped. Also, since W0UCE joined ranks of silent keys in February, we are working to get up a new web page with a lot more information to take the place of information formerly hosted on Jack's web page. We ARE working on it and will have it open to the public as soon as we can. Learning HTML and web pages (which I had managed to avoid for years) has proven to be quite the task for this old retiree steeped in IBM mainframes. But I AM getting there. 73, Guy K2AV. On Sun, Sep 4, 2016 at 2:02 PM, Art Heft <[email protected]> wrote: > Greetings to all from a first time poster... > > I am going to use an FCP with an inverted L for 160. I have 2 questions: > > 1) can I run the FCP parallel to the horizontal wire or should it be > perpendicular? > > 2) can I use #10 bare wire for the FCP? > > Thanks and 73, > > Art K8CIT > _________________ > Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband > _________________ Topband Reflector Archives - http://www.contesting.com/_topband
