Just put a Chez Procaster on the air to replace a 3 year old iA.M. Talking House with UTC. HUGE improvement. Excellent signal for about a mile--fringe at 1.5 and barely noticeable at 2.75 miles.
Even at .8 miles the signal was almost as strong as a 5KW about 7 miles away.
I have 32' of copper rods in the ground connected with #2 gauge copper wire (as big as I could get).
The iA.M. was only good for 1/2 mile at best with the same ground system. Still a little tweaking to do, but so far I'm very happy with it. Gerry, at Chez Radio, was extremely helpful and took the time to give me tips through the process.
Thanks for the mini review.
Your ground scheme is interesting but I need to ask how the ground rods are installed, driven in vertical or laid horizontal?
#2 copper wire might be overkill but I was recently reminded of the importance of a good ground when my indoor transmitter connected to my indoor test antenna was producing a signal about 10 dB below normal. The problem was a poor connection between the transmitter and ground. I suspect the ground connection integrity is often overlooked (I did) yet it greatly affects performance.
Neil
I pounded them in vertically, got them below frost-line. There are 3 8' rods and 2 4' rods (the 4' ones were already in the ground). I wondered too about overkill with the #2, but read that the more copper in the ground, the better. I figured I was not going to do this again--getting old, you know, so made it as good as possible. It was $2 a foot. I live in a rural area, some electrical interference on the main road, but otherwise pretty quiet. There are about 225+/- homes in the coverage area.
I use a Talking House, (pre-I-AM) unit, which uses ferrite rods in the antenna tuner. Someone had posted a document detailing the Talkinghouse ATU, which made me look up that kind of 'permeability tuning'.
One site said not to use ferrite or iron core material in the tuning coil of a P15 antenna, it's too lossy. It's the writer's opinion, but it made me think about some of the Talkinghouse output power being drained by those ferrite sticks.
Now the Rangemaster uses a big donut core, and the Pro Caster looks like an air coil on a form without anything inside of the coil turns.
32 feet of copper rod, then #2 ground plane!!!! i envy you!!! even if i had the property i could not afford all that copper.