Yes, the real world on 160 is very complicated, and by some issues that
seem, anyway, to be unknown to more hams than not.
W8JI had a 160 dipole up at 300 feet and ran over a year's worth of A/B
tests, concluding after all that data, that the dipole would never beat a
commercial-AM-BC-quality vertical and radial field, and only infrequently
would equal it.
160 behaves more like the broadcast band than not.
80 is the transition band to horizontal 40 and up. An 80 4 square is a
common and satisfactory solution to DX and contest operation, though not
the ultimate. 8 circle vertical arrays, and such things as catenary
supported wide spaced 80m four element wire yagis or tower supported two
element quads seem to be king of the hill, indicating a mix of vertical and
horizontal killer solutions. By 40m killer vertical solutions are gone.
People put up fixed wire yagi's on 40 that a 40m four square cannot touch.
Over in northern Europe there was for a while a full size mega-monster full
sized 3 element 160 horizontal yagi, where the two story house at the
bottom of the tower looked like a dog house in the picture. Interestingly,
I never saw rave reviews on that solution. It was so large that
parachutists would do base-jumping off the end of the boom. In the end,
regardless of the amazing engineering to get it up in the first place,
northern winter weather got it.
However one might explain it, or try and quantify it, on 160 meters it is
clear that generally and on average, **efficient** vertically polarized
antennas will beat the snot out of **efficient** horizontally polarized
antennas.
Whether one can manage some degree of QSO-making from a disadvantaged setup
has to be answered "yes". One only needs favorable propagation path loss
that can tolerate the degree of RF loss in the disadvantaged antenna
system.
With vertical polarization on 160, the answer always lies in discerning RF
loss in the antenna system, or proposed system, including effects of
environment. Cleaning out all the remediable RF loss issues in a system
will most likely render a strong performer. A simple mid-sized inverted L
on 160, **where all the RF loss issues have been cleaned up**, will put one
in the top 10% of transmitted signals, significantly exceeded only by
well-done multielement designs, or single element antennas at one of those
amazing locations.
A phenomenon in 160 contests, which I observe to this day, is that, at a
decent contest station, 90% of the strong signals will be worked in the
first third of the contest, often in the first several hundred contacts if
one starts S&P. After that there will be a handful of midwest and
east-of-the-Rockies QRP stations I hear, whose signal strengths EXCEED the
majority of the rest of the stations in the contest.
That leaves one with an inescapable observation, that half or more of 160
meter antenna systems in use are somehow brutally disadvantaged.
Even if one presumes that the huge percentage of mid-to-late contest QSO's
are only 100 watts, that still leaves one with the problem that the great
proportion of those 100 watt signals ARE DISADVANTAGED BY AT LEAST 13 dB RF
LOSS SOMEWHERE IN THEIR ANTENNA SYSTEM/ENVIRONMENT. They are being exceeded
by stations running QRP.
While vertical vs horizontal could account for some, there is a large
collection of anecdotal reports + RBN measurements from remediated stations
that show such a magnitude of loss is decidedly possible in a vertical
system.
In this discussion about horizontal vs vertical, one must make sure we pay
attention to the 1000 pound gorilla in the room: Remediable RF loss in the
antenna system and environs.
73, Guy K2AV
k2av.com
*--------------------------------*
*Lowering SWR does*
* not reliably predict*
* better performance.*
*A dummy load, *
* with its perfect SWR, *
* is a worse antenna *
* than a light bulb. *
*First discern and remove *
* RF loss in low band*
* antenna systems and*
* their environments.*
*----------------------------------*
On Thu, Mar 29, 2018 at 10:11 AM, K4SAV <RadioXX@charter.net> wrote:
> If you run a NEC analysis it will show that a 160 dipole at a half
> wavelength height will blow away any vertical when the signal is broadside
> to the dipole. The people that have tried this say it aint so. At least
> some of the reasons are that NEC knows nothing about 160 propagation and it
> knows nothing about the effect of Earth's electron gyrofrequency. That
> varies a lot depending on where you are located on this earth. Analysis is
> nice and easy but you have to include everything for it to simulate the
> real world, and the real world on 160 is very complicated.
>
> Jerry, K4SAV
>
>
>
> On 3/28/2018 9:50 PM, Mark K3MSB wrote:
>
>> I don't think so. In my Electromagnetic Fields and Waves class in EE
>> school (way back when dinosaurs just stopped roaming the earth and
>> Constellations still graced the skies...) the prof derived the equation
>> for
>> a received signal. The polarization terms disappeared after the first
>> ionospheric bounce.
>>
>> 73 Mark K3MSB
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 28, 2018, 9:03 PM Steve Maki <lists@oakcom.org> wrote:
>>
>> Interesting. Some say that on 160 vertical polarization rules, while on
>>> 80, horizontal polarization rules (or at least *often* rules). Of course
>>> polarization and angle of arrival are two different things...
>>>
>>> -Steve K8LX
>>>
>>> On 03/28/18 17:23 PM, Roger Kennedy wrote:
>>>
>>> Well I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again . . .
>>>>
>>>> In my experience, most DX propagation on 160m ISN'T low angle (unlike
>>>>
>>> 80m
>>>
>>>> when it nearly always IS.)
>>>>
>>>> For the past 45 years, at several different QTHs I've always used a
>>>> horizontal co-ax fed halfwave dipole, only 50ft high . . . I'm sure most
>>>> people would agree I put a respectable DX signal. I've regularly worked
>>>>
>>> all
>>>
>>>> over the world on Top band, and I've never had trouble getting through
>>>> pile-ups to work Dx-peditions.
>>>>
>>>> Plus a dipole at 40 feet will never really be an inverted vee ! (just a
>>>> horizontal antenna with drooping ends) - You'd have to have the centre
>>>> at
>>>> least 100ft high for it to be an inverted vee.
>>>>
>>>> Roger G3YRO
>>>>
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