<< You can find practical examples all over the world that support what
I say. One is on high tension lines, where a round very smooth ring
or ball is used to reduce corona from bolts and other hardware in the
same general area of the line. >>
Another example is your car radio antenna. It is a round-ish shape on
the top to reduce the static buildup that would otherwise make the radio
unlistenable. If the top of the antenna was spikey, wind generated static at
60 MPH would be horrendous.
Cheers, Steve K7LXC
Not so sure about this one, since the ball on the car antennas is mainly for
safety reasons. If you remove the ball - I did it once - the difference in
noise while driving is negligible. Also you have a lot of various rubber car
antennas with no ball functioning perfectly.
The theory which was presented by K1TTT is very reasonable, just the question
is if there is some practical possibility how to get rid of the static
discharge.
My observation is very skeptic. We do have 40 m Yagi at 42m and above on the
same tower at 52 m is 5Y for 20 m. So according to theories presented here the
static rain should be reduced by the 20m ant significantly. In the real life
for instance while snowing in cold weather when the static rain is always huge
both antennas are unusable and the noise is about the same on both antennas ?!
It would be interesting if there is some HV - energy transfer engineer which
could explain functionality of the balls above some HV lines. I have learned in
school that the losses on very-HV lines (above 220kV) are in the range of
dozens of percent !!!!!!!! - which means a lot of coal, oil or nuclear energy
- i.e. BIG BUCKS. If this solution would really work the balls would be on all
HV lines but they are just on a few ones !!!!! The electric companies "swim" in
money so the expenses to install balls everywhere are peanuts compared with
savings of only one percent of the energy lost by static discharge.
73 !
Jiri
OK1RI
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