I ran across an interesting little article over on the Antennex site ( http://www.antennex.com/guests.html) under the Ham Workshop section. The article is by Peter R. Woodland, VK3KCG. "Experiments With Short Verticals on 160 Meters"
Since he lives on a small lot (1/4 acre), rather then burying a large number of radials for the ground he used a wire around the perimeter of the property instead. He loaded the antenna with a ferrite toroidal coil rather than a large open air coil and was using short verticals ranging from 10 ft to 30 ft in height. If I'm understanding the article correctly, it appears he claims he got considerably better performance than tests using 8 short buried radials *or* a half-wave dipole.
Admittedly, it's 160 meter Ham operation, not AM BCB part15. But considering his test frequency was 1.818 Mhz, and some of the tests were done with a 10 ft vertical.. I wonder if some of the principles involved might be adaptable for part15 AM? If so, it might be of interest to those of us with small amounts of yard to work with?
Daniel