In article . com,
"stan" wrote:

I thought it was a joke but the reference to the ARRL handbook lends it
some credibility. In the article, the author took a rectangular piece
of wood and glued 4 dowel rods about 6" long into each corner and
wrapped the various lengths of antenna wire around the 4 rods, tied
them off and connected one end of each to a bus bar. The bus bar was,
in turn, connected to the tuner. He says the whole thing went into a
locker. I look to the experts to tell me wether this is something which
works or not.

Stan


What your discribing is a "Tuned Counterpoise", and is what would
replace the "copper ground" for the autotuner. There are a "few"
problems with this approch to Marine MF/HF Antenna designs.

First, the "Tuned Counterpoise" has a very narrow Bandwidth, which is OK
for some HF Marine applications where only one or two channels are
available for use, in each band, but as a general coverage antenna,
"they Suck, Bigtime".
Second, Because of the "High Q" nature of this system, any frequency
movement off higher or lower than the counterpoise is tuned for will
GREATLY degrade the preformance of thew antenna system.
Third, the lower the frequency of this type of system the narrower the
bandwidth will be. At MF Frequencies the difference between 2182Khz
and 2638Khz would completely detune the counterpoise effect, and
radically reduce the efficency of the system.

Basically, the theory is very iffy, and the practicality of such a
system is very poor, when compared with more conventional Marine
MF/HF Antenna Systems. It is pure "Hookum"


Bruce in alaska who has seen such "Hookum" in action many times...
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add a 2 before @