01, The ask in one paragraph
A short sentence, so that the rest of this page is optional reading
Pick one Victorian building near you that still has its original spire and down conductor, instrument the spire at three points for a two day fieldwork visit plus twelve months of passive current logging, and publish the result. The three measurements are a near field standing wave scan, a base impedance sweep, and a long term induced current log. The measurements test whether the spire is functioning as a quarter wave aerial, a Franklin lightning rod, both, or neither. The data goes directly into a publishable result, and it settles a question that currently has no direct primary measurement in the literature.
Why there is no such measurement already: the two communities that would have done it (antenna engineers and architectural preservationists) do not overlap. Antenna engineers treat 19th century ornament as an aesthetic artefact. Preservationists treat electrical audit as an unrelated discipline. The experiment has been technically trivial and politically orphaned since at least the 1960s. This brief is an attempt to adopt it.
02, What you would be doing
Three channels on one spire, clean verdicts specified in advance
The three measurements
- Channel 1. Near field H probe at three metres from the spire tip, 100 kHz to 30 MHz. Detects a quarter wave resonance peak.
- Channel 2. Vector network analyser at the down conductor above the ground clamp. Measures base impedance. A lightning rod reads single digit ohms resistive; a working aerial reads 35 to 50 ohms at its resonance.
- Channel 3. Current clamp on the down conductor, twelve month logging at 1 Hz. Captures fair weather leakage baseline and storm event pulses.
Instruments and budget
- NanoVNA class or calibrated VNA, $500 to $15,000
- Near field H probe plus spectrum analyser, $2,200 to $8,200
- Current clamp and Campbell Scientific class logger, $4,000
- Soil resistance tester, $800
- Field mill and weather station, $1,700
- Cables, calibration standards, mounting, $1,000
Total kit, under $25,000. One operator part time. Fieldwork is two days on site; the year of passive logging needs a weekly data pull, no attendance.
Positive on all three
The spire is a functional quarter wave aerial and a functional Franklin rod. Novel primary result. Confirms a dual purpose reading that currently sits only on geometric consistency.
Lightning only, antenna null
The spire is a working Franklin rod with no aerial function. The antenna reading is refuted on this building. Still publishable, still moves the field.
Antenna signature, lightning degraded
Ground continuity broken but the geometry still resonates. Unlikely on an intact building; if it occurs, isolates the engineering layer from the preservation layer.
Flat on all three
The ornament is electrically inert on this building. One building does not settle the question. Replicated across two or three, a cleanest available refutation.
Each channel resolves independently. Each outcome is specified before the experiment. No post hoc reasoning about ambiguous data can rescue either position.
03, Candidate buildings
Nine sites, any one of them works, pick the nearest
The short list is the Section 52 measurement targets from the research knowledgebase. Each retains 19th century spire and down conductor geometry, has verifiable construction date, and has preservation partners on record. The experiment needs one building, not all nine.
- Saratoga Springsca 1870 to 1900New York State, USA. Easiest first pass, private residences with preservation agreements.
- Cape Mayca 1865 to 1895New Jersey, USA. National Historic Landmark, town-scale preservation authority.
- Biltmore Estate1895Asheville, North Carolina, USA. Private site, research access precedent.
- Château Frontenac1893Quebec City, Canada. Civic monument, complete restoration records.
- Grand Palais des Beaux-Arts1897 to 1900Paris, France. Named in the 1904 Bonfils and Fesquet catalogue's own installation register. Primary-source documentation of named foundry installation, the only candidate here that has it.
- Palais Garnier1875Paris, France. Documented preservation programme.
- Vienna Rathaus1883Vienna, Austria. Gothic Revival civic ornament, full original cresting.
- Moscow Historical Museum1883Moscow, Russia. Full spires, state monument documentation.
- Hungarian Parliament1904Budapest, Hungary. Most elaborate surviving 19th century European spire array.
04, Why this is worth a postdoc semester
Novel primary data, bounded scope, publishable either way
The experiment sits in a gap that is unusually easy to cross. The instruments are off the shelf. The buildings still exist. The procedure is three standard measurements that any RF lab executes as undergraduate calibration exercises. What is missing is someone who does this as the experiment itself, on one of the original ornamented spires, and writes it up.
The scientific return is proportional to the outcome, and every outcome is worth publishing. A positive result is a new category of primary measurement on 19th century building technology, tying rooftop ornament to functional RF engineering. A null result closes a specific heterodox hypothesis with clean primary data, which is rare and valued. A mixed result distinguishes the lightning protection function from the antenna function on the same object, which is a diagnostic outcome that the current literature cannot produce.
The cost is a fraction of a standard research grant and the fieldwork fits inside a short semester. Preservation authorities are typically receptive to non invasive RF measurement; the clamp ammeter and near field probe do not touch the ornament.
05, How to respond
One sentence of interest is enough to start
If you are an electrical engineering researcher, architectural preservationist, civic engineer, or independent researcher within working distance of any candidate building above, a short expression of interest opens the conversation. The project is happy to share site shortlists, instrument specifications, preservation liaison approaches, and the knowledgebase sections underlying the design.
The full experimental design, including every instrument choice, the rationale for each channel, and the verdict-before-data outcome grid, is on the measurement page. The cold email template on the repository at outreach/cold_email_template.md may also be adapted by anyone who wants to forward this brief into their department.