Does a home base earth plain have to be equal sided?

Just wondering about improvised earth plains a bit? Everything I see about them usually shows a square or circular shaped metal plate to stand a magmount on , Or 4 equal length radial limbs. is this essential?

I currently have my homebase antenna sat on a 2 ft by 2 foot metal plate in my den, BUT I have an unused 5ft by 10 inch windowsill available I could put the magmount on if I placed a suitable sized lump of metal on it? would that work or screw everything up??

If it's not equal you'll not get an equally radiated pattern in all directions. Say you're using four radials, one points north, one east, one south, one west. If you remove the one pointing north you'll find that signals from the north get weaker by somewhere between 1 to 2 S points.

If you're using a 2ft x 2ft metal plate that's doing next to nothing as a RF ground anyway and it's your coax that's actually working the most as your RF ground.

If your den is above ground level you could put it on the windowsill as you planned and attach a length of wire about 9ft long to the metal plate and let it hang down vertically towards the floor. You've then created a kind of vertical dipole.

Thanks for that, Nightmare house unfortunately in the best places to put an antenna means the coax would have to travel through multiple other rooms or out, round, down and back to reach the den. and the best place to get a decent ground plain is not suitable for the antenna etc.

I may end up using something like a Thunderpole excalibur halfway up the outside of the house is i get desperate, but I'm not supposed to have external antenna on this estate.

The whole this may be a mute point either way because after days of listening at all hours on 27 AM, FM, UKFM USB and LSB I've not heard any traffic.

BillMasen wrote:

The whole this may be a mute point either way because after days of listening at all hours on 27 AM, FM, UKFM USB and LSB  I've not heard any traffic.

There is quite a bit of activity on 27 mhz atm with Poland,Denmark,Sweden,Norway,Spain,Italy all contacted over the last couple of days.

But i guess your antenna isnt pulling in too well but i will say many of those stations were a good 5/9 sometimes +10 signals..
Being on at the right time can be an issue as propogation can be a fickle thing...

Indeed 11 meters opened into Europe late saturday afternoon and into the early evening, 10 was dead at just a meg up for me. Success is all about the antenna system.

Unless propagation is very good or you have a bunch of locals to talk to compromised antennas won't cut the mustard anymore.

Bill you might have to look at operating away from home portable when this virus thing blows over. Don't consider the Excalibur it's a very poor antenna.

73's Gary.

Cheers guys.