Electrically-small ground planes degrade the performance of ground-based highfrequency receiving arrays because the arrays are more susceptible to earth multipath, ground losses, and external currents on element feed cables. Performance degradations include a reduction in element directive gain near the horizon, distortion of the element azimuthal pattern, an increase in the system internal noise factor, and increases in the array factor root-mean-squared (rms) phase error and beam-pointing errors. The advantage of electrically-small ground planes is their relatively low cost of construction and maintenance. iii,--
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