Attachment of radials on a quart-wave Fritzel GPA 404 multi-band vertical. As many ground plane antennas, these flexible radials work at ground level, but are of course very efficient a few meters above ground too, tight at 90 or 45°. They are made of stranded steel wires protected with PVC. Each radial is cut for a specific band (their lenght varying from 2.6 m for the 10 m band to 10.3 m long for the 80 m band) knowing that this vertical is 6m high. Radials must be tight, one end insulated, the other one fixed at the antenna base (in fact to the mast, the gray tube) to be efficient as their are fully integrated in the antenna design. i.e. on the 20 m band this antenna 6m high must be completed with a 5.2 m radial, giving a vertical cut at l/2. In other words these radials fully participate in the correct waves propagation in a much better way than using traps. Like the braid of the coax, all radials are screwed and grounded to the mast, not to the antenna. The picture at right shows that radials are placed in an area of about 160° wide around the antenna, each 30° apart, the longest well separated from the others to prevent coupling. They are thus not symmetrically tight around the antenna like we would do in building a ground plane. This configuration uses what we call "counterpoises". It is unbalanced and does not provide shielding that requests a real ground (many more radials all around the mast). This configuration is however more directive compared to other kinds of designs. This vertical offers a gain of 3 dBi not really better than a dipole (2.14 dBi) with the advantages
to provide some directivity by the position of its radials and to be easy to setup (in 15 minutes in the field).