Practical Application of Soil Measurement Data

Anyone interested in ground radials, ground mounted verticals and even elevated radial verticals should visit Larry Severns, N6LF, website. he has done extenstive research om the subject and has published his results in QST and QEX with many of these articles available on the website. His article ” Experimental Determination of Ground System Performance for HF Verticals Part 4 How Many Radials Does My Vertical Really Need?” was originally published in QEX May/June 2009 edition. The following graph was taked from this paper:

This graph shows the change of signal improvement on a 1/4 wave vertical with 1/4 wave ground radials under different ground conditions. The impact of this graph is that when the ground is “good”, adding more radials results in small signal improvement vs when using a “poor” ground. I can expect a .2dB improvement if I double my radials from 8 to 16. If I double again to 32 radials my signal improvement would be only around .5dB.

There is a real economic benefit to having good soil as in general fewer radials are needed because the ground losses are less than when over poor soil.

More on Soil Meaurements

It is extremely easy to take soil electrical data using the RigExpert by running a frequency sweep. This sweep is saved on the meter and then transferred to the PC and exported as an CSV file. This file contains impedance measurements across the sweep range. Add the formula to convert to conductivity and Er and you get the following graph:

This data was calculated with a Co = 8 pF adjusted after making a few more measurements. The average values per band are as follows:

The values above can be compared to those given as standard values in EZNEC. I further compared the gain results when using a 40m 1/4 Wave vertical with four ground mounted radials as follows:

In this case, the model has a 2.27dB difference in measured gain between the average soil case and the measured reading. In practice, using the “Very Good” values will likely be close enough for modeling work here at the QTH.

 

Measuring Ground Properties at the QTH

Rudy Severns, N6LF, published a paper entitled “Measurement of Soil Electrical Parameters at HF” where he shows several methods of measuring the electrical properties of soil. I built an OWL probe using his directions made from two parallel 1/2″ aluminum rods spaced 4″ apart and 11″ long.

Once assembled I measured the capacitance of the probe with the L/C capacitance meter which measured it to be 6.16 pF. I inserted the probe in the ground around my vertical antenna then connected the RigExpert AA-230 Zoom and measured impedance at several frequency points in the HF bands. The Resistance and Reactance are used to calculate the soil conductivity and Er values. Here is a graph of the results:

The data collected at this one point confirms that the soil in South Texas is quite good in terms of conductivity and Er. I will use these values when modeling antennas with EZNEC. This was the initial test and I will likely try some other areas of the backyard and see how much it varies and whether the data is consistent