Energized antennas

[wbswetnam]

A poster warned me not to put a dipole antenna in the attic of a house because the heat from the radiating wire element could ignite the wood beams in the attic. So if I use an 18ga wire for a dipole antenna, does it really get that hot with only 100W (average) transmitting power on HF? Should I not use insulated wire as an antenna, in this case?

 

[mancow]

No it's not going to burn anything.

 

[popnokick]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11B651 Safari/9537.53)

At 100W input power to the a antenna it will not get warm enough to even measure without a very sensitive thermometer. In short, your antenna and 100 watts will make a lousy heater.

 

[wbswetnam]

Looking back at the post, he seemed concerned that a corona ball at the end of the element tips could cause a fire if they occured near the wooden rafters. Is this a possibility? If so how are corona balls avoided?

 

[popnokick]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0_6 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/7.0 Mobile/11B651 Safari/9537.53)

Not an issue for a wire dipole antenna at a fixed location running 100W input. Read:
http://www.k0bg.com/static.html