Just before the CQ WW CW contest, I put up a new beverage with some help
from the plaquemeister himself (W7EW). The antenna is about 750 feet
long - over flat ground (fairly good ground with lots of horse fertilizer)
and running 60 / 240 degrees. This was a comprimise between visibility
to the wife (aka "Beverage Cutter") and being pointed roughly in the
direction of European and African signals. The height runs from about
8 - 12 feet - as it only has three supports - two at each end and one
roughly in the middle. It runs sort of as a diagonal across a rectangular
horse pasture which has a wire fence around its perimeter.
During the CQ WW CW, the antenna was very useful for many of my QSOs
compared to the 4 square.
On 160, it was quieter than the TX antenna (a single vertical) most of
the time - even when listening to stations from the west.
This weekend, I modified it to make it reversible. It isn't the two wire
method - but rather a brute force technique that uses 900 feet of RG58 to
run along the fence line to get to the other end of the antenna - and some
fancy switching with relays so I could feed +12V down the feedline to
switch directions (I can draw this up if anyone is interested).
Why not use two wires? That would increase the visiblity by at least 3
db, and increase the risk of the beverage cutter finding it.
Listening to WWV/WWVH on 2.5 MHz and 5 MHz indicated that the array does
indeed have some F/B. I do notice the 6 or 7 db of attenuation from the
RG58, but WWVH was much better in the west direction. Also, the ZL
beacons and HS72B this morning could only be heard in the west direction.
I will probably replace the RG58 with hardline at some point.
As W8JI says - it is hard to beat a beverage for how simple it is and
how well it works. I am using 560 Ohms for my terminations, but might
try some different values now that I have a better way to measure F/B.
I will have to take this down in the Spring and put it back up in the
fall - so the beverage cutter won't get to it - but I can live with that.
73 Tree N6TR
tree@kkn.net
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