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Here’s a way of making an artificial ground if you have a Procaster or Hamilton Rangmaster as they are both the same in design with an enclosed metal cabinet.
For those that don’t have the facilities to do an outdoor set up with a real ground or use an indoor cold water pipe as you would have to place the transmitter under the kitchen sink to avoid too long a ground wire this is the solution for you! It works!
I’ll refer to the Procaster here. Pull off the wire that is connected to the ground terminal on the circuit board. It’s just a push on/off contact and get it out of the way. Then with a thin wire such as 24 gauge hook up wire take about 15-20 inches and connect one end(solder or use mini alligator clip) to the ground terminal and wrap the wire twice around the circuit board looping the wire twice around the little antenna tuning meter underneath it then back to the ground terminal and attach again with a mini alligator clip or solder to the ground terminal again so it’s a closed loop.
Now before I did this I had the Procaster indoors using a 104″ wire, not the section aluminum antenna that it comes with, as I have an indoor set up, and with the antenna wire exactly as I had it with the transmitter exactly as it was before, after I did this the meter reading increased by a large amount directly corresponding to a comparable signal increase from the antenna as measured off the antenna with a hand held field strength meter/frequency counter. I did mine neatly by removing the circuit board from the cabinet and dong this on the back of the board neatly soldering the wire to the solder terminals of the ground lug on the reverse and not seen when mounting the board back in the cabinet with the four screws. Totally legal as the wire used is the same length as allowed for ground lead as the antenna on the procaster is 104″ and the Rangmaster 102″ and you have up to 118″ legal length total but also consider this, the wire you installed does NO radiating into space as the metal cabinet will shield it. It just makes more signal radiate from the antenna. You may have to adjust the meter with the adjustment to the right as if you are pegging the meter you won’t see a peak.
This was just a try and see and was surprised at the result.
Also if you tape the antenna wire to a wall or large window and try different shapes this affects the meter peaking and the resulting amount of signal from the antenna.
Here’s a picture…Mine is done neatly underneath but this is the idea.
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