Shipbucket

Does anybody know the nature of the quartet of diagonal poles on the 'shoulders' of the SAMPSON dome? I've often wondered about this.

Some sort of active sidelobe monitoring? But they seem in structure and form much more like a VHF antenna - there's little to indicate to me there's any S-band 'nub' on the end.
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And if they were for this purpose, why not have them either at the center of the antenna in height, or duplicate them near the bottom of the array? And what's the deal with the very similar-looking non-rotating poles below the radar?

It looks as much as anything like a severely height-limited set of lightning rods, but this seems silly... doesn't it?

Furthermore, should we make any note of Artisan's somewhat similar bunny-ears?

I recommend reading, or at least skimming, the paper. One interesting note is that we ought to try to represent segmented lightning diverters on the satcom dome on I-Mast, as in aviation practice.