The groundng effect of a lump of steel shouldn't hurt it too much.
'Theoreticaaly' the reflector is the minimum area that one can 'get away
with' .

Not that simple, depends on what directional characteristics you want..

Additional material, provided it's behind the dipoles, shouldn't
matter.

RF energy is what 'we' call 'funny stuff'

Thats because its a bit difficult to understand, theres nothing "funny"
about it!...

(another technical term ) bits of
cable, such as co-ax, that seem to be normally resitsive become 'open
circuit' and/or 'dead short circuit' at different points along the cable
once one starts trying to stuff rf energy along it: technically it's all to
do with lambda and halve and quarters but as lambda changes with frequency
it all get too hard for humnas to suss out. { partly becaue it's all tto
hard to imagine 'receiving' things off an aerial - we utilise the theory of
reciprocity and pretend that the aerial is a transmitter }

Good idea

Your Irish installers seem to have attempted to install a phased array,
wherein one dipole will 'interfere' with it's adjacent neighbour cauisng
nulls and maxima to overlap creating a narrowing of the beam without
significantly increasing the received signal .
Adding these four signals together in such a manner that they sum
accumulatively and not destructively is a non-trivial task. Attempting to
transmit such a signal down a non-homogenous cable to a receiver is another
minefield. Reflections at junctions and terminations at cable end will
almost invariabley caue a 'Standing Wave' to be generated, and Sod's Law
[may be known as Murphy's Law in the Republic]


I thought he was a Yank?..

will almost guarantee that
you may have an minima at the end.

Had a quick discussion with the installers today and suggested that I
might be interested in paying their bill if they might be interested
in coming back and doing a proper installation...

..we'll see....g

Thanks
Adrian

Now to find out if there's any 'good euro'


--
Tony Sayer