On Fri, 08 Apr 2005 21:50:36 -0700, Roy Lewallen
wrote:

Close. It's Goubau, from "Surface Waves and Their Applications to
Transmission Lines," J. Appl. Phys., vol. 21, 1950. An interesting
variation is described in "Low-Loss RF Transport Over Long Distances",
by M. Friedman and Richard F. Fernsler, IEEE Trans. on Microwave Theory
and Techniques, Vol. 49, No. 2, Feb. 2001, describing a system the
authors describe as "simple, inexpensive, lightweight, and [having] low
attenuation". They used a strip of aluminum foil 6 cm wide and 0.02 mm
thick with periodic punched holes as the line, strung it around a lab
with the strip suspended by threads, and measured low attenuation. How
this could translate to a practical outdoor system for "long distance RF
transportation" as the authors claim is beyond my feeble imagination.

Darn it Roy, that's your problem... no imagination. These guys
apparently couldn't see the commercial applications either.

They should have written a companion article in Worldradio News about
the super performance they see when using this stuff to feed E-H and
Fractal antennas.

And if they had been really sharp they would have started a company
ahead of time---let's call it "Foilman"---(apologies to Press Jones)
and been ready to peddle this stuff to hams.

A coupla glowing reviews on eham.com and the money would roll in.

Wes

ps. I going to go out and start punching holes in the elements of my
20-meter beam and see what happens.