eddie,
i posted a link to what w8ji had to say on his website about 1/4waves vs 5/8waves such as imax a few years ago and a couple of times since then, he talks about the imax2000 or similar no radial endfeds and what clearly is a starduster style antenna,
what he says imho answers why you see a funky pattern when you add the mast to your new top_one model,
i also posted about what cebik had to say about 5/8waves at different heights above different conductivity ground in his upper hf monopole article,
i don't have an issue with eznec,
why you would think myself and other people have no faith in nec because of something lb.cebik told me about modeling the sigma style antenna is beyond my comprehension,
plenty of people use nec to good effect, its out there for peer review,
many of my own ideas come from people who use nec,
we have used ideas from w8ji based on his models and seen positive results more than once that the j-pole camp poopoo,
lb.cebik did not say modeling the sigma style antenna was impossible, what he said was that it would be very difficult to model that antenna and get accurate results, w7el also gives us a warning in the manual.
when we test antennas we use an unmodulated carrier, same mast/feedline, make sure there is no skip and signals are stable, make sure there are no locals pumping the receivers agc,
there is always a winner and the winner is always ahead, there is no flipflopping between which antenna is best, its not scientific but it is usually consistant/repeatable,
whenever there is skip/multipath all bets are off, you can get the flipflop even when using two identical antennas on different masts.
