I’m retired from 45 yr in RF telecommunications and a near life long ham and cruised extensively. There is always a lot of ‘varible’ information here on complex issues, such as SSB HF installations. Even local Marine
Electronics business great on
plug & play
radar,
GPS, sonar, Marine FM installs, often employ terrible practices on SSB installs... so be careful with word of mouth information that your life may depend on someday.
Yes I have worked over 100 countries on very poor marine antennas (even sometimes using as little as 5 watts)... but I use the most favorable propagation times/ frequencies and the stations usually are land based with very good antenna installations/
power. When the chips are down,
lighting is everywhere, and you’re 100 miles off shore and maybe 500-1000 miles from someone who can help/ get information to/from... and you’re best option might be another boat with limited antenna and suffering your same atmospheric
noise... you want the BEST SSB
installation you can reasonably have. Also consider that your main SSB antenna could become damaged and you’ll need to rig just a random length wire up the flag
halyard... you’ll need the best ground/ counterpoise system you can possibly get to partially make up for the make-shift antenna.
Seems to me if you’re going to be out of the water anyway... this is the time to install the very easily installed through the hull DynaPlate. It’s just two holes through the hull and some 5200. Takes about 15 minutes to decide where to install it and about ten minutes to actually do the simple
installation.
Why do I think you/ others should reconsider the comments that it’s not necessary? I have 2” wide copper foil from stern to bow epoxied/ waterproofed down, one of the mail-order pre-assembled counterpoises, and the DynaPlate. As a test, to convince another cruiser, I disconnected all of them and one-by-one reconnected them, and then various combinations of two of them.
First I showed him that even with no RF ground at all ground we could still receive stations... pretty well. But when we transmitted the turner wouldn’t/ couldn’t properly tune causing to transceiver to
power down to only a few watts to protect itself from the high SWR. So just because you can receive some signals is not the yardstick to rely on regarding how well you will be heard.
Then I connected what I knew was the least effective RF ground/ counterpoise... the one the cruiser was using (the store bought 23’ counterpoise that you pull through boat that he insisted he got excellent signal/ reports. Yes it worked and he said ‘SEE’ works great seeing a so-so S-meter reading and hearing the station. Now we called the station and asked how he was hearing us. He response was ‘OK’. Then I connected my stern to bow straight 2” wide
Cooper foil (46’ ketch) and asked how do you hear us now? The response was ‘wow, what did you do... turn the power way up! Then we disconnected the store counterpoise... and the station said still very strong/ no difference.
Then I disconnected everything again and connected just the through the hull DynaPlate RF ground and the station said it seems just as strong as the stern to now
Cooper foil. But when we also connected the Cooper foil to the DynaPlate the station reported the signal went up even further.
Conclusion:
1) the store bought 23’ counterpoise is maybe just barely ok in a pinch/
emergency but not the best option, by far, if you are doing serious off-shore cruising. (... and added nothing to an already good RF ground system.)
2) Just a DynaPlate or well installed 2” aft to bow Cooper foil are acceptably good alone. But for your best signal/ redundancy, especially since you already have the makings of a Cooper foil installation, I recommend BOTH a DynaPlate and the aft to bow Cooper foil.
Now about the Cooper foil installation (and why I feel strongly about why you should still install the DynaPlate)... first, the Cooper foil MUST be as straight as possible. RF does like 90 degree bends... it’s effectiveness almost stops at the first bend. So if you thought you had a 40’ Cooper foil RF ‘ground/ counterpoise... depending on how many 90 degree turns you have you may only have the actual performance of 10-15 feet. And worse, if you don’t
epoxy it to the hull/ seal it from hull condensation/
salt infiltration... it will soon corrode badly and actually corrode to failure in a few years in a ‘wet Boat’ leaving without knowing it... no RF ground/ counterpoise... maybe when you really need to have effective HF SSB for emails/ wx/
emergency. And even before it fails, RF ‘travels’ only on the skin of conductors so as the foils starts to turn green... that corrosion is actually creating significant ‘resistance’ to the RF and reducing its needed performance... even if beyond the surface the Cooper is in good shape.
After the easy Dynaplate installation and connection to the tuner/ transceiver there is nothing to do except don’t paint it with bottom paint/ anything... wire brush it during any hull cleanings/ haulouts.