saying that someone needs to buy a product to know how it really works is the oldest sidestep in the CB marketing game.
go take a look at the Copper electronics forum archives and see how many times that exact opinion is expressed.
like i said in the beginning, if he has come up with something that no one else has figured out yet, he should get a patent on it.
if he does not want to do that, there is only one reason.
it is not new.
as for the coil below a cap hat thing, it seems to me that its just two different approaches to electrically lengthening an antenna.
if the goal is an antenna of a particular length that matches at 27mhz, then these techniques can accomplish that.
i would rather use just the cap hat so as not to introduce the resistance that the coil brings with it.
maybe i can make an antenna for 27mhz that is only 38.5" long by using a cap hat and maybe i cant, if the horizontal radials of the cap hat stick out past the edges of my vehicle, maybe i dont want that, so i add a loading coil below the cap hat so that the horizontal radials stick out only as far as i want them.
if my main goal was to be able to fit into a particular garage at the end of the day, then this would be one way to accomplish that.
the only difference i see between using a cap hat and a loading coil besides the resistance of the coil, is the difference in Q factor that might yield different bandwidths.
this all goes back to our discussions on the astroplane patent sheet where Herbert Blease talks about replacing the 4 foot vertical member up top that has the cap hat on it with a full sized 1/4 wave vertical radiator.
as far as i remember, the difference was in the bandwidth.
LC
