On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:13:46 -0700, Joe
wrote:

And BTW
tarnished silver is the best, even better than gold.

The tarnish doesn't do anything good. On a relative scale, silver is
250, copper 225, as is gold. Aluminum is 175. Stainless is about like
lead, 6 or 8. Plain carbon steel is 25. Thermal conductivity is
closely correlated with electrical conductativity for what that is
worth. Better at one is generally better at the other.

Casady

On Oct 13, 7:27 am, (Richard Casady)
wrote:
On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:13:46 -0700, Joe
wrote:

And BTW
tarnished silver is the best, even better than gold.

The tarnish doesn't do anything good. On a relative scale, silver is
250, copper 225, as is gold. Aluminum is 175. Stainless is about like
lead, 6 or 8. Plain carbon steel is 25. Thermal conductivity is
closely correlated with electrical conductativity for what that is
worth. Better at one is generally better at the other.

Casady

Richard...I'm telling you one of the worlds top antenna designers
lives here and I just happened to be lucky enough to get his help
setting up my radios. If he tells me tarnished silver is the best for
HF I take his word for it..If our goverment flys him all over the
earth to design develope and set up the best....that's good enough
reference for me.

Joe

In article .com,
Joe wrote:

Richard...I'm telling you one of the worlds top antenna designers
lives here and I just happened to be lucky enough to get his help
setting up my radios. If he tells me tarnished silver is the best for
HF I take his word for it..If our goverment flys him all over the
earth to design develope and set up the best....that's good enough
reference for me.

Joe

Your Designer Friend is certainly speaking from experience. The
Experience of a Job that has little monitary consideration. The rest of
the non-commercial boaters of the world may not need the "Money is no
Object" design, where the difference between Tarnished Silver, and
plain old Copper Foil, could possibly be significant, to the RF Ground
for their MF/HF Antenna System. Larry's observation that the Series
Impedance of the RF Ground, is considerably MORE significant, than the
Resistance difference, between Tanished silver and Copper Foil, in
the Total RF Ground Impedance of the Antenna System.

Bruce in alaska who has designed and installed RF Ground Systems
for LF/MF/HF Radio Stations on Land and at Sea
for the last 40 Years.... and inspected them
for Regulatory Agencies, in the past.....
--
add path before @

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 17:17:34 GMT, Bruce in Alaska
wrote:

Impedance of the RF Ground, is considerably MORE significant, than the
Resistance difference, between Tanished silver and Copper Foil, in
the Total RF Ground Impedance of the Antenna System.

No trouble believing that. Note that silver has ninety percent of the
electrical resistance, other things being equal. Thing is, there is no
reason why things should be equal. Make the copper foil ten percent
thicker and it will have the same resistance. I think a wide strap for
a conductor, to reduce inductance, would be helpful, but I don't
really know.

Casady

The tarnish doesn't do anything good. On a relative scale, silver is
250, copper 225, as is gold. Aluminum is 175. Stainless is about like
lead, 6 or 8. Plain carbon steel is 25. Thermal conductivity is
closely correlated with electrical conductativity for what that is
worth. Better at one is generally better at the other.

Casady


Richard...I'm telling you one of the worlds top antenna designers
lives here and I just happened to be lucky enough to get his help
setting up my radios. If he tells me tarnished silver is the best for
HF I take his word for it..If our goverment flys him all over the
earth to design develope and set up the best....that's good enough
reference for me.

Joe

I bet Larry could tell a few interesting stories on this subject.
Antenna designers are really in a world of their own. Back in the day I
remember a group of antenna engineers that were hired to keep a large
surveillence receiver antenna working. They would come down and crawl
inside the antenna case with a small metal tackle box. After a short
while you would hear some light banging here and there and then they
would come out and test it. The tackle box they carried had several
hammers in it they used to shape/tune the antenna with. In conversation
with them and from reading on the subject I learned that when it comes
to antenna design some of what you think should make sense, actually
doesn't. And sometimes stuff just works when intuitively you would think
it wouldn't.
Red

Red wrote in news:%sXQi.1096$932.869
@newsfe12.lga:

Richard...I'm telling you one of the worlds top antenna
designers
lives here and I just happened to be lucky enough to get his
help
setting up my radios. If he tells me tarnished silver is the
best for
HF I take his word for it..If our goverment flys him all over
the
earth to design develope and set up the best....that's good
enough
reference for me.

Joe

I bet Larry could tell a few interesting stories on this
subject.
Antenna designers are really in a world of their own. Back in
the day I
remember a group of antenna engineers that were hired to keep a
large
surveillence receiver antenna working. They would come down and
crawl
inside the antenna case with a small metal tackle box. After a
short
while you would hear some light banging here and there and then
they
would come out and test it. The tackle box they carried had
several
hammers in it they used to shape/tune the antenna with. In
conversation
with them and from reading on the subject I learned that when
it comes
to antenna design some of what you think should make sense,
actually
doesn't. And sometimes stuff just works when intuitively you
would think
it wouldn't.
Red



We COULD turn your 55' mainmast into a conical monopole, like the
gummit uses on HF, but the cage might interfere with the genoa...
(c;

About the banging, one of my technical college associates was the
wife of Dr Rufus Fellars, Chair of the Electrical Engineering
school at the Univ of SC in Columbia. One of the UHF TV stations
in Columbia had a bad reflected power from their multimillion
dollar antenna system 1200' up. They hired Rufus to correct it.
He took the measurements, did some calculations and drew up plans
to put 3 dents in the UHF feedline, creating another reflection
to cancel the one they had. Machinists installed the dents, and
when the station was turned back on, it had no reflected power
one could measure, making their big multikilowatt UHF beast very
happy, indeed.

Denting works at microwaves much better than HF, however. Dents
at HF frequencies are measured in hundreds of feet, not inches.

HF on a boat has but two antennas...a flagpole....a clothesline.
Neither antenna is "resonant" at the frequencies you want to use
them. So, we must always compromise by having a very lossy L-C
tuner in the line to match the complex impedance of the
clothesline, with its highly reactive component creating that big
reflection, to the 52 ohm resistive-only transmitter. This is,
virtually, a variable dent you can slide up and down the line
that also varies in depth and width to match the wide variety of
frequencies Marine HF has spread across. You are using the same
antenna system the Morse operator on Titanic used with his spark
gap CW transmitter, feeding a tuner to untuned wires between her
masts. If you look at qrz dot com and put in my call W4CSC into
the search engine, you'll see a picture of me holding a 300,000
volt ceramic insulator that failed around 70 KW on a pirate radio
ship I had befriended the captain and chief engineer of. The
tuner was built into the top of the military HF transmitter:
http://hawkins.pair.com/voanc1.shtml
It came from Voice of America in Greenville, NC, bought surplus:
http://hawkins.pair.com/voanc/voanc07.jpg
This transmitter was built into the fish hold of an old Canadian
offshore fishing trawler and installed at one of our little
shipyards for Rev R G Stair, who talks directly to his God and
rapes the women living on his commune in Canadys, SC. The boat
was supposed to be taken to Belize where he'd bribed the right
people to let him anchor offshore in international waters
microwaving his religious nonsense out to the boat for HF
transmission on the shortwave bands. But, the captain, a non-
religious man living in St Kitts to avoid American prosecution
about a pirate 100KW FM station they used to run from a sailboat
off NYC, was afraid the "brothers" were going to feed him to the
fish as soon as he got the boat in place and working. So, to
attract the FCC's wrath and prevent the boat from moving, he
transmitted on the pirate's favorite frequencies just above 7.3
Mhz in the 41 meter band at 70KW from the Wando River here. It
worked. FCC swooped down and confiscated everything making a big
show in the paper of what great bureaucrats they are at
protecting the airwaves of the rich and powerful, like Clear
Channel Commications, Inc. to keep the airwaves for themselves.

That insulator sure made an impressive arc when it exploded...(c;

Larry
--
You can tell there's extremely
intelligent life in the universe
because they have never called Earth.

On Oct 16, 1:53 am, Red wrote:
The tarnish doesn't do anything good. On a relative scale, silver is
250, copper 225, as is gold. Aluminum is 175. Stainless is about like
lead, 6 or 8. Plain carbon steel is 25. Thermal conductivity is
closely correlated with electrical conductativity for what that is
worth. Better at one is generally better at the other.

Casady

Richard...I'm telling you one of the worlds top antenna designers
lives here and I just happened to be lucky enough to get his help
setting up my radios. If he tells me tarnished silver is the best for
HF I take his word for it..If our goverment flys him all over the
earth to design develope and set up the best....that's good enough
reference for me.

Joe

I bet Larry could tell a few interesting stories on this subject.
Antenna designers are really in a world of their own. Back in the day I
remember a group of antenna engineers that were hired to keep a large
surveillence receiver antenna working. They would come down and crawl
inside the antenna case with a small metal tackle box. After a short
while you would hear some light banging here and there and then they
would come out and test it. The tackle box they carried had several
hammers in it they used to shape/tune the antenna with. In conversation
with them and from reading on the subject I learned that when it comes
to antenna design some of what you think should make sense, actually
doesn't. And sometimes stuff just works when intuitively you would think
it wouldn't.
Red

Some of those hammers were used to bend fins in the waveguide cavities
no doubt. The claws were employed to bend mechanically activated
tuning tabs here and there. Been there, done that, sold the t-shirts,
spent the money on drugs like caffeine, carbohydrates, etc. Didn't
like it, not going back next tour. Too uncertain. Too dusty.

ACTPSF (Always check the power supply first) is the eleventh
technicians' commandment. I hope that is ambiguous enough for you.

When the feet rot out of this world's biggest ground plane ask
yourself why it wouldn't matter, and why it would. Nebacudnezer might
know.

Antennae, like anything electrical, are bifilar devices. The power
"ground" line is part of the antenna if you have a monopole antenna (a
nonconfabulation, or oxymoron). Local static is equally expressible as
noise in the transmitter as it is in the receiver. The resistance of
the "ground" is connected to the end of the ground lead in the power
supply, but the resistor isn't connected to anything in common between
the tx and the rx, except for the distance. The distance between the
two non connections is related to the frequency and the distance and
the propogation path and the orientation (or call it the polarization)
between the two fields in the "ether well" or gravitational effects
field, as far as the coupling fields are concerned. Who doesn't
understand that? "Ground" is irrelevant, as it does not exist at radio
(wireless) distances, but only in local fields, where you have test
equipment with one lead marked "ground", for idiots.

Terry K -the eleventh technician, who revels in 16 channel data scopes
and differential glitches inside the discrete processor core with
75,000 test points, caused by old drum memory bearing wobble, known as
"RIMP", for NuDet reporting, long obsolete in NORAD, an early, buggy,
phone booth sized workstation connected to arpanet's daddy, defnet,
only they didn't tell us that was what "they" called it around the
water cooler, while we sat, bomb bait in our fallout shelter
"careers". Aargh! I feel as if I wasted my life!

Distillation will not remove radioactivity. MAD is our only hope,
aside from habeus corpus. Thank God for the crazy Americans.

I have no other credentials except my music, which I still cannot
transmit on the internet, because weener dozer won't sell me data
upload wads at near cost, nor you.

Damn! I am getting to hate computers. The last time I plugged a real
modem into my computer, the winmodem driver burned out my motherboard
centronics printer port. Argh! Phoner25.zip doesn't work on widoze
2000 any more! CRAP!

Jump ship! Copy LINUX for free, manuals extra. Write your own drivers.

What freedom? I just bought my mortgage as an investment in my SDRRSP,
now must pay the bank to supervise foreclosure on myself if I don't
pay the debt to myself, so I must pay myself interest, and income tax
on the income. Why can I not simply forgive myself the debt?

On Sat, 13 Oct 2007 12:27:03 GMT, (Richard
Casady) wrote:

On Thu, 11 Oct 2007 07:13:46 -0700, Joe
wrote:

And BTW
tarnished silver is the best, even better than gold.

The tarnish doesn't do anything good. On a relative scale, silver is
250, copper 225, as is gold. Aluminum is 175. Stainless is about like
lead, 6 or 8. Plain carbon steel is 25. Thermal conductivity is
closely correlated with electrical conductativity for what that is
worth. Better at one is generally better at the other.

Casady


I have silver at 0.0159 microhm meter at 20 degC
copper 0.0168 microhm.meter
gold 0.022 microhm meter

So gold may not be not quite as conductive as the best, but it STAYS
at that value - no tarnish....

Brian W

Brian Whatcott wrote in
:

I have silver at 0.0159 microhm meter at 20 degC
copper 0.0168 microhm.meter
gold 0.022 microhm meter

So gold may not be not quite as conductive as the best, but it
STAYS
at that value - no tarnish....

Brian W



I wish you guys would worry much more about "series inductance"
and lots less about how expensive you can make the damned ground
strap.

Look at your ground strap and follow it down to whatever is
supposed to be "ground" on your boat.

1 - Are there any sharp corners or folds back over itself to make
it look really neat, like boaters love their stuff?

This is bad, very bad. Every sharp curve increases the series
inductance, and inductive reactance. If it bends 90 degrees, you
have a 1/4 turn coil in series, raising the ground at the tuner
MUCH more than the total combined resistance of all the metal
chemistry in the circuit, which increases with frequency.

All turns in the ground strap should be as large a diameter as
you can make it and very smooth to reduce series inductance. It
should be routed in as straight a line from the tuner to the
ground as you can make it, for this same reason. This strap is
PART of the antenna. It radiates like mad when you're on the
air, into the bilge wiring, the reason why the LEDs in the DC
panel all light up when you talk. They're detecting the RF
induced into those DC cables in the bilge.

Now, let's put away the periodic tables and go reroute the ground
straps, taking off all the pretty tywraps and making them as
straight as possible, shortening them as much as we can.

Larry W4CSC and other fine old calls since 1957
--
Bruce will be by to inspect your installation, shortly.

On Sun, 14 Oct 2007 01:39:43 +0000, Larry wrote:


I wish you guys would worry much more about "series inductance"
and lots less about how expensive you can make the damned ground
strap.
....
Larry W4CSC and other fine old calls since 1957


A valid point. But then, running an insulated wire underwater
has rather appreciable series inductance too
(which can self-tune at some frequency -
I wonder what fx that is? :-)

Brian W