On Thu, 14 Jun 2018 21:28:50 -0500, amdx wrote:
====snip====
> I want to find the termination resistance that is the same value as the
> characteristic impedance as the wire. Thus I need to measure or use some
> technique to find the proper termination resistor.
It's not the *wire* that has the characteristic impedance, it's the wire
and the ground return circuit that provides the characteristic impedance.
What you have there with your BOG, is effectively an extremely leaky
transmission line feeder that happens to have a useful directional
response to skywave signals (both front and back along its length if the
far end isn't terminated with a dummy load matching its characteristic
impedance).
If you can set up a variable dummy load which impedance can
automatically track the ever changing characteristic impedance of your
'leaky feeder' antenna[1], apart from variations in the signal voltage
transfer function into the Rx's input impedance, whatever impedance
mismatch you have at the Rx end won't matter one jot as far as
suppressing the unwanted reverse direction of signal pickup.
Anything coming in from the 'back' will never bounce back to the Rx due
to the perfectly matched dummy load termination and any signal received
from the forward direction hitting an Rx mismatch will only suffer a
portion of its energy being bounced back to the terminated end, never to
trouble the Rx again.
[1] After reading that pdf on the mysterious drop in performance of a
BOG, I'm guessing that an obvious way to improve performance, as well as
reduce variations in Z, would be to lay down a metre wide 100 metre long
roll of thin copper sheet along the ground upon which to lay your BOG
wire and hammer a pair of grounding rods either side of the copper
groundplane, say every ten metres, to bond the copper sheet to ground for
good measure.
It still won't be perfectly stable with regard to Z but it will come a
damn sight closer to the ideal and reduce losses to boot. :-)
A much cheaper, and more practical alternative to this problem might be
simply to suspend it a few feet above the ground clutter (say 6 to 10
feet, depending on the nature of the ground clutter and how often you
plan on hacking it back).
Incidentally, the Z of a BOG will vary along its length according to
variations in the local ground conductivity. This isn't usually a problem
since in general, these changes in Z tend to be relatively smooth in
nature. It's only step changes in Z that give rise to unwanted
reflections that would spoil the immunity to unwanted signals arriving
from the back end.
This leads on to the idea of an extremely long BOG not needing to be
quite so perfectly matched to its termination dummy load since the
increased return losses will improve the situation of unwanted
reflections spoiling its rejection of signals originating in the reverse
direction.
Given a long enough wire, you can simply bury the last ten yards or so
into a shallowly downsloped trench and forget about adding a discrete
terminating impedance altogether. Just let the ground do the job for
free! :-)
--
Johnny B Good