GROUND CLEARANCE FOR HF AND LOWER FREQUENCY ANTENNA INSTALLATIONS

Setting up ground based antennas for operation in the HF and longer wavelength bands frequently involves clearing large areas of land for the installation of ground mats to provide a high conductivity return path for the displacement currents. In moving from the cleared area to the virgin scrubland beyond, which is assumed to be forested with bushes and small trees, there is the possibility of an abrupt change in surface properties at the boundary resulting from the discontinuity in the vegetation which at longer wavelengths can be modelled as a change in surface impedance. By modelling the trees and bushes as point dipole moments, the aim of this paper is to estimate the significance of any such effect in terms of the gross physical properties of the vegetation. The result is to show that in normal circumstances the effect can be expected to be slight. A solution to this problem has application in helping determine the environmental footprint of the antenna installation, the amount of land that needs to be cleared to satisfactorily accommodate it.