anyone ever tried or heard of this trick ???

[BOOTY MONSTER]

First, purchase two, inexpensive, 75' rolls of aluminum foil. Unroll about 8 feet of foil from each roll and lay in on the ground, the rolls forming a 90 degree angle to one another. Twist the first foot of foil into a thick, aluminum wire. Then twist the two twisted ends of the foil together. Use a short clip lead or other attachment method and connect the foil to the ground system. Even better, connect a length of ground braid and route it directly to the point on the transmatch in the shack. Measure your antenna's SWR with and without the foil ground hooked up. It shouldn't make any difference. If it does, then you need a better ground system. Repeat this procedure for each band, unrolling the length of the foil so it is 1/4 wavelength long for the band being tested. If your ground system is working well, there will be no difference in SWR readings.

the above was cut and pasted from here .....
http://radioworks.com/nbgnd.html#A

i don't have a base (yet :twisted: ) . just thought this was a bit different and that some would get a chuckle out of it .

 

[W5LZ]

Also called a 'tuned' ground or counterpoise. Have I tried it? No. On the bands I normally use 8 feet of foil ain't gonna be near long enough . Also have a pretty good ground system (RF and safety grounds) so nothing would really be 'improved' much.
A little bit further down in the URL you gave is that MFJ 'Artificial Ground' thingy. Basically the same thing as the foil thingy except it's tunable. The only 'catch' with those things is that the end of the wire used with them gets really RF 'hot'. As in it can burn your fingers/carpet/whatever if it isn't insulated pretty good. Not a bad gizmo if your radio isn't on the ground floor, sort of.
About the foil trick. It's a standard 1/4 wave stub sort of thingy. Not necessarily the same length as a piece of wire, but there's quite a bit more surface area on that foil than any common sized wire, so the foil can be shorter. [(246 x k)/f in Mhz = 1/4 wave. The 'k' is what's different, diameter of the conductor.] There is no benefit to using braid. If you start having weird, varying, grounding problems and you use braid in there somewhere, try replacing it. You might really be surprised... I was.
- 'Doc

 

[Beetle]

The only antenna I ever used with that MFJ "Artificial Ground" was an end-fed long wire - just a tad over 500 feet long and about 40 feet up at the ends, spanning a bit of a gully northwest of Vegas (near where my buddy Ron and I built our half-mile-per-leg vee beam a couple decades before). Ground conductivity is extremely poor unless it's been raining, and it hadn't been for weeks. I had access to one of the MFJAGs, so I figured, why not?, and hooked it up.

One counterpoise wire per band really isn't enough. I wound up using a dozen 70-foot wires in a rough circle from the feedpoint. All the feedline was homebrew 450 ohm stuff - VERY good quality. Everything worked nicely, with good worldwide reports.

Balanced antennas at fixed stations, like dipoles, yagis and groundplanes don't need RF grounding and won't benefit from your installing one. If you're using this sort of antenna and you get RF in the shack, you generally have a problem with your coax.