Where to mount your Greyline: height, location, and ground.

Ground level or rooftop? Lake dock or oceanfront? Condo courtyard or front entry? Does a shorter antenna give up the low bands? These are the questions operators ask before the post goes in — and the modeling answers them clearly. Here is how a Greyline behaves where you actually put it.

Mounting height: ground, eave, peak, or tower

Antennas like height — but most of us mount at ground level, and the good news is that a Greyline plays well there. These plots model a 20’ Greyline at four heights: ground level, house eave, house peak, and tower top, across 10, 20, 40, and 80 meters.

Two things stand out. On 80M, the ground-mounted 20’ holds up remarkably well against the 50’ tower install — encouraging for those of us without a tower. And on 10 through 40M, the ground-mounted vertical competes with the 50’ install for both gain and low takeoff angle. That low angle is what works Real DX — not bad for a 20-foot antenna at ground level. If you can go taller, the 24’ and 28’ add a little punch and a lower angle on the lower bands.

Do the shorter models give up the low bands?

The low bands want length — a quarter wave is 66 feet on 80M, 135 feet on 160M. That is a tall tower or a tall tree. So the fair question about a 12’ or 16’ Greyline is: how much do you give up? Less than you would think. The feed system is engineered so a short radiator that “thinks it is 66 feet tall” still works the band — operators are working 160 through 6 meters on the 16-footer, morning, noon, and night.

A short Greyline against a base-fed vertical with 16 buried radials holds its own — and the clear framing is this: if you want to beat a no-radial Greyline with a radial-dependent vertical, the answer is more copper. A lot more. Sixty-plus radials to make a real difference, 100-plus to truly compete. Or skip the radial field entirely, which is the whole point of the vertical-dipole design.

Find the quiet spot first

Docks, lakefronts, and saltwater

Water is your friend. Many operators mount on lake docks — no radials, no guy wires, fastened or roped to the dock, temporary or permanent. Lakefront lots tend to be wide-open and quiet, which means a low noise floor and a clean take-off. If you enjoy tinkering, you can experiment with elevated radials a few inches above the ground or dock — but you do not need them; the vertical dipole works as-is, out of the box.

Oceanfront, bulkheads, and saltwater docks are the best location of all — saltwater is a near-perfect ground screen, miles of it, reflecting your signal at a low angle. Waterfront verticals routinely compete with big inland Yagis on tall towers. Mount within 20 to 30 feet of the water for the strongest effect, though the saltwater boost reaches operators well inland of the shore too.

For the curious

Why a no-radial vertical works on any surface — concrete, rooftop, dock, or saltwater — comes down to the off-center-fed design, covered in What Is a VDA → and grounded in the physics on the bookshelf we read from → (Zavrel W7SX, Kraus W8JK). Want to size the model to your lot and bands? The full gain data by height → shows every model’s sweet spot.