USING A 160 METER DIPOE AS A T MATCH FOR160?

[W2PFY]

Or for 160M, tie the open wire feeders together to end feed the open wire. The 125' dipole against ground will become a capacity hat.  The system will then have some desirable vertical and horizontal components for general AM coverage assuming you lay down some ground radials to work against.   (system is now a vertical 'T' for 160M)     Verticals work especially well on 160M when set up right.

Tom K1JJ suggested this for another thread but it has me wondering on how well this same antenna would work as a T on 40 meter and on 20 meters. I could easily do this at my camp but I would have to put out some radials which is not a problem. My 160 meter antenna does not work very well in the NE area and want to improve my signal if possible, by going to cheep & easy....My antenna is up at about 80 feet.The north end is at 355 degrees.HLR says my signal is weak compared to a real dipole that I once had up.  

[W1ITT]

What do you have for a ground system under that Tee ?  If you go to Rob Sherwood's site,  sherweng.com    way down at the bottom he has some technical papers dealing with various topics.  One of them is a reprint of work that he did  and published in Ham Radio Magazine on using wire screen as ground.  It turns out that you can get a pretty effective low resistance ground using this method.   His measured data shows this clearly.
I have a 90 foot high wire Tee for 160 with a bunch of radials but not nearly enough.  In winter I roll out four pieces of plastic covered galvanized chicken wire.  It's a foot wide and there's 150 feet of it divided into four radials...unequal lengths, whatever fits.   I just rolled it up a coupld days ago as grass mowing season has begun and I don't play as much 160m in summer.  And there's still a less adequate system still connected. There's a measurable impedance change when adding or subtracting the chicken wire.  This past winter I worked plenty of Europe on SSB as well as a SSB contact into the Indian Ocean with a "big signal, Norm" report  I found the plastic covered chicken wire on Ebay. Scrape a bit of insulation off and solder pigtails to connect to ground common.
That being said, 160m is a higher angle band.  You may end up preferring the dipole configuration for communicating with Skowheathen.  But give that Tee a chance with a decent RF ground under it.

73 de Norm W1ITT

[W2PFY]

That is a lot of good info you put out there Norm. I had no idea that it took that much in the way of radials to get the best signal that we can cheaply achieve? I can put out more than 750 feet of radials in various lengths. The antenna is opposite of my building across the lawn. I suppose that the radials should be under if as much as possible and fanned out. I think to get a common ground to the transmitter I may need to run a welding cable back from the antenna ground system to the transmitter ground system. Do you think that would be necessary?

The links are working today?

Thanks Terry