~ Long-Wire Notes ~
L.B. Cebik, W4RNL

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Long-Wire Notes by L. B. Cebik, W4RNL, reviews and analyzes a realm of antenna developments that began in the 1920s and reached its pinnacle in the early 1940s.  However, many forms of long-wire antennas remain in service to this day, including the amateur favorite, a center-fed doublet that is a dipole on 80 meters, but is used on the upper HF bands, including 10 meters.  Although there is no definition of when an antenna becomes long enough to be a long-wire, element lengths greater than about 2 wavelengths generally fall into this historically important category.

In Long-Wire Notes, Cebik reviews the general principles, beginning with unterminated center- and end-fed wires.  He moves into terminated single long wires, still employed today at many installations as wide-frequency directional back-up antennas to damage-prone rotatable arrays.  He devotes a chapter to unterminated and terminated V beams, and 2 chapters to the rhombic, the highest achievement in long-wire technology.  As a consequence, the rhombic has seen the greatest use and the largest number of both structural and electronic variations.

The terminated or traveling-wave form of all long wire antennas sacrifices varying degrees of forward gain in return for the high directionality once necessary for trans-oceanic HF communications.  More advanced long-wire designs strove to overcome a key disadvantage of these antennas—a susceptibility to high-level forward sidelobes.  The combination of an excessively narrow main lobe beamwidth and the presence of many significant sidelobes eventually led, in concert with the large acreage these antennas required, to the dominance of other designs.

However, long-wire antennas still have much to teach us about antenna behavior in general. Besides providing excellent case studies of the difference between standing-wave and traveling-wave antennas, they also contribute to our understanding of the basic behavior of all wire antennas. In Long-Wire Notes, Cebik provides the widest possible coverage of all major types and variations, along with extensive data on their anticipated performance under many operating conditions.

The book provides both expanded data and expanded coverage relative to his well-received series of long-wire articles in antenneX. Along the way, he pays tribute to the contributions of many of the earliest luminaries in antenna engineering.

* * * Below is an index of the chapter titles found in this book * * *
Long-Wire Notes
L.B. Cebik, W4RNL

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