Hi Rollerball Rocco, I should guess, it was just a support structure,
The problems of water rusting the joins in all mast sections, where flanges are bolted together
can give problems, most landbased ILR type masts, had a copper strip running up the entire length
As most mast sections are Steel, that's not the Lowest resistance of metals, hence more loss

Main problem with short antennas, is reactive high voltage, Say for instance...
If you think of a Car radio antenna, for MW it's Very Very small, say a decent one, couple of foot
It should be Hundreds of foot long, so Which bit is Missing ? It's Not what you think...
The small antenna on the Car, is the Very Very Top piece, of the Hundreds of foot high it should be
The section Below the actual Antenna, is effectively Coiled up inside the ATU, (if you were TXing)

So a proper full Quarter wave, has high volts at the very top, and low volts near the feedpoint
but with a small mickey mouse antenna, that's not long/ high enough, reactive high volts appears
at the feedpoint, When we did the refurb of the KCBC antenna, we made the top capacitance hat wires
Longer, so they were just above point you could not reach them, (as the ends were the high volts point)
When we had done this, it really improved things, so with running 60W, you could actually touch
the feedpoint without getting bad RF Burns, The ATU was a simple L network, Fixed Cap. Variable inductor

Thing with all Antennas, What Radiates, is Current flow, RF amps, With an antenna too short,
you can end up, with More current flowing in the ATU coil, than on the actual Antenna itself, hence lossy
I remember yonks ago, seeing a photo of one Mi-Amigo loading coil, with it's copper tubing
that was glowing cherry red, in the the dark of the TX room

So with temporary antennas, some effort was usually made, to 'spread out' the very top part,
to try to reduce corona discharge, Even the failed Valcon one on the Ross, had Rings on the tip
to help with this, Short antennas are very poor radiators, ideally you want any coils high up
but not practical, but a large base loading coil is the worst place to put it...Think of some CB Antennas
like the DV27, they had a coil near the top, but it was then a weak point, if it hit a tree

A very useful device, that I used at KCBC, when we needed to sort out, the rotted away buried ground wires
was, 3 bits of wood, fixed together, resembling a Snooker Triangle, with a bit of coax round it
(to screen the Inner) as a One turn Current pick up tranny, with this you could see the relative
current in each earth stake, on a 50 micro amp meter, simply by holding it near the wire

Remember the Spy Sets during WW2, they had a bulb in series with antenna, you tuned ATU
for the brightest bulb, showing max current peak, then they had a switch to short bulb out to use TX
clever stuff eh


Rod Watts