I've had low (30-40' up) 160m dipoles in essentially 3 QTH's.and always had inverted L's to do A/B realtime comparisons.
. Here up on a good sized hill (660'ASL), rocky excuse for soil. (14+ yrs) . At previous QTH, 30' ASL, wet swampy soil in most directions. (12+ yrs) . At CY9AA, surrounded by salt water in 360* (< 2 weeks of operation) In ~30 years of Topbanding, only *once*, at the swampy QTH did the low dipole outperform my inverted L's on transmit. There was one greyline opening to 9M6 that he was 539 or something on the low dipole and inaudible on the inverted L. Even on St. Paul's (N.) island-CY9AA (1997) completely surrounded by salt water mere feet away from the antenna, it sucked really bad on 160m and the balloon vertical kicked its butt 100% of the time. At this ridgetop QTH where I've been extremely active the past 16+ yrs contesting and DXing at no time did I see various 'low' dipoles ever outperform inverted L's on 160m transmit. (every once in a blue because of an arcing transformer or someone welding in the local area, the dipole might be quieter on RX, but it's exceedingly rare) I tend to view peoples claims about low dipoles with a huge grain of salt.especially when they have no antenna to compare it to. YMMV CU (all of a sudden) (in the RAC Winter? in the Stew?) Mike VE9Antenna Antenna Mike, Coreen & Corey Keswick Ridge, NB _________________ Searchable Archives: http://www.contesting.com/_topband - Topband Reflector
