If it was your Am station what would you do >>?

For the radial system you can leave it connected to the common ground rod, I get excellent results with that same setup. However, you will not be able to keep the Rangemaster elevated with any ground wire and still stay legal to the letter. To be completely legal you'd have to have the transmitter no more than 2 feet above ground level.

I have always used Zara Radio for my automation software, I've tried others but have never found one that works as easily and flawlessly as Zara.

I echo Mighty1650's words.

I would experiment with radials.  You don't need a 1/4 wavelength length for a short radiator - you can try 10-20 feet per radial.  It saves a lot of wire & doesn't require a lot of space.   You might want to check the ground conductivity for your area - it it's favorable, then you might not need them at all.

Hello Joe the RadioHAM -- it was good to meet you at the ALPB meeting.

With all three of your questions you are way ahead of me even though you are new and I've been on the air for 10 years!

I  have been using Zara for quite awhile and it has done a great job. I very much intend to install and try RadioDJ out of curiosity, but haven't done it yet. I personally like to try everything so I have direct knowledge about what can be done.

Have never had a Rangemaster nor a transmitter on an elevated pole, but I absolutely have proven for myself that radials do FAR MORE in terms of range than a ground rod. I have written about this a lot and plan to experiment with different sized radials, but right now only know what's written by other people.

Radials will certainly improve your ground plane if you have poor soil conductivity.  If it's good (as mine was), they made little difference.

"It's ungrounded and gets out all over town covers about 80% of my town Parkersburg, Iowa of about 2500 people..."

That dumbfounds me, I have mine ungrounded on the roof and it only covers a few blocks like that to a car radio, even less on a portable hand held radio. Basically a few blocks away on three sides I'm surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean.. why wouldn't I acheive such ranges ungrounded?

I am still new at this and still learning. Hopefully I will ALWAYS be still learning. I tried RadioDJ at first and it just seemed too complicated for me. I'm sure I didn't give it a fair chance and it might be great software. But then I tried Zara and it just worked. I'm sure it does 20 times more than what I use it for but it was simple enough to allow me to get several play lists up and running with little effort, so I am sticking with it, and eventually will get into the more advanced stuff it does. 

Radioham asked "If it was your Am station what would you do ?"

Avoid an elevated installation, a ground mounted over radials installation works for me.

What I did was install twelve 10 foot long radials connected together at the base of the transmitter connected to the ground of the transmitter.  Since my transmitter does not have an internal loading coil there is one installed colinear with the vertical  radiator.  Power and audio are supplied by means of a buried cable.

The transmitter is running a  <100 mW DC final input power and the total length of the transmission line, ground lead, and antenna is 3 meters.  Out of band emissions are down at least 35 dBc.  The installation is intended to meet the requirements of 15.219 and I don't worry about questions regarding elevated mounting and rationalizing if elevating is legal or not since my install is not elevated and such a debate with myself would be moot.

Maybe more and longer radials would help but I am happy with what I have..

Neil

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I know what an efficient radiator does with a connected groundplane field of radials but as far as a out of tune ineffcient antenna thats barely measureable down to khz doesnt behave the same as a full radiated antenna system. If you look at a walkie talkie it has a compromised antenna and yet we can use it on cb on 2m or 440 and using a crappy rubber ducks what works the best with this kind of crappy antenna .. ((HEIGHT) and that's all have you ever heard of a contact between another state and a microwatt kids walkie talkie >>??< i am gonna say no... never happened yet we build our radials out like it's gonna behave like the big boys .. (WHEN WE START THINKING LIKE A WALKIE TAKIE) we will get out better and quit fooling ourselves its got to do with pure line of sight and nothing to do with factor tricks that only work well with tons of power..   Height location location location and did I mention location away from objects that absorb your  big old rf micro peanuts of power

AM has very little to no line of sight characteristics. Though CB certainly has a mixture of both groundwave and line of sight.

Well... since AM does have difficulty penitrating buildings and even tree leaves tend to suck up rf, I would suggest it certainly does have some line of sight charicturistics.

It is no doubt obvious but no body has mentioned it so I'll point out that the antenna of a licensed AM station being the entire tower at higher than 100-feet is BOTH ground-mounted AND elevated since it reaches from the earth level right up into the sky.

With the much shorter part 15 medium wave antenna, whether it sits at the ground, or is held somewhat higher up, it is only able to grab a small fraction of what a full height tower achieves.

The fiddling over which is better goes on year after year being only talk.

When is somebody going to prove it one way or the other?

I think a lot of it has to do with grounding and your local ground conductivity. I found with an ungrouded or poorly grounded system that height would make a world of difference. I also found with an elaborate enough grounding system the signal would ultimately out preform the elevated install. This all gets thrown out of course if the elevated installation is properly grounded, in which case prepare for double digit milage in coverage.

Basically I found if your transmitter is high up enough you can somewhat, if not effectively, make up for poor grounding.

Mighty 1650 has said:  "Basically I found if your transmitter is high up enough you can somewhat, if not effectively, make up for poor grounding."

The reason I believe that is because so many people have reported excellent results with high ungrounded medium wave installations!

Mighty, you said: "Basically I found if your transmitter is high up enough you can somewhat, if not effectively, make up for poor grounding."

Curious what you mean; How high before it starts to compare to performance of a grounded ground install?