I've got a K9AY but it's not really as good at hearing weak signals
as I'd like. With the contest coming up this weekend I thought I
ought to try laying out some wire and see how that will do. The wire
I have is surplus CAT wire, 8 conductor and I have several thousand
feet of it.
Behind the house there's a salt marsh and that the edge of it is my
Inv-L and the radial field. I'm not too willing to go very deep into
the marsh as it's still not frozen and there's a fair amount of wet
areas I don't care to chance sinking into.
There's nowhere I can go that will not cross on top of the radial
bed, each radial is 130' long and there's 60 of them.
A problem are the deer; I have a rope barrier around the feed point
of my antennas so they don't get into it but I can't protect a wire
close to the ground and once in the marsh, I have nothing to hold the
wire up and the deer will come by either foraging or fast as being
chased by the coyote population and they will surely pull at the wire
as they run through.
>From the house to the marsh is 350' I can probably get out another
150' into the marsh with wire but I don't know about more. Depends on
the tide and how dry the land is. Again, because of the terrain &
some water filled areas, there's nowhere I can run the wire without
crossing the radial field.
seeing as I am planning to run as much wire westward as I can (that
will give me the most straight line distance) I can't predict the
distance. I have no idea what to do about a termination resistor
seeing as if the wire gets tripped by a deer, it will certainly pull
the end free. So my thought is to just leave it unterminated and
maybe tied to a bush or clump of reeds for the purposes of the
contest. From the house to the marsh I can string it up in trees &
brush maybe 8' or so off the ground.
That said, I have to make a transformer. I see the drawing of the
trifilar transformer in the ARRLs antenna book on CD, the 21st
edition, Chapt 13 page 21. regarding a single wire beverage. I can
make that tomorrow & run out the wire.
With all the above info, is there a better transformer I might could
look at instead of this one? Any suggestions I might try to
incorporate?
And, will I get decent results if I just lay it on the ground or is
it definitely better to elevate it?
This'll be my first Beverage attempt... All new to me!
Thanks!
73,
Gary
KA1J
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UR RST IS ... ... ..9 QSB QSB - hw? BK
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