NEC-LIST remarks on folded monopoles for MW

    I'm a brazilian consultant and field engineer for broadcast
transmition. I have been dealing with folded unipoles for at least
three years and I have to disagree with Hal Smith about the
performance of this MW antenna.

    Every folded unipole I worked with (no exception) performed
surprisingly well! It presents an extremely good coverage and mostly
important, the reception signal seems to be smooth in the entire
coverage area, I mean there are no fail of signal between high
downtown buildings for example, as is very common in large cities of
this country like Sao Paulo and Rio.

    It seems to me that the great difference is the way I'm doing the
folded unipoles, i.e., with a cage of 9 drop wires and with an
off-ground radial wires (2.2 to 3 m suspended from soil), equally
spaced around the support-tower. The last two installations were 75 m
high and 110 m high folded unipoles respectively operating on 710 and
610 kHz, with plain sucsses in coverage area and high quality sound
reception. Believe me, the sound received in a car radio for example
is much louder and of much better quality than the competitors,
including stations with higher output power.

Sylvio Damiani
Sao Paulo, Brazil
Received on Sun Apr 26 1998 - 17:26:42 EDT