Topband: Beverages

[K9AY]

(de W8JI) --

> The only things hurting a Beverage besides catastrophic
> construction errors or bad components are:
>
_______

Bad components are quite common, based on my personal experience helping a 
number of hams get their Beverages working. Here are the ones I've seen:

* Using wirewound resistors, or rather, "lossy inductors"
* Wrong value resistors -- faded color code (red looks like brown on the 
third band), misinformation on the choice of resistance, or just a bad 
resistor out of the junk box.

The remedy is simple -- use new 2-watt carbon, ceramic composition, or other 
robust, non-inductive resistors. Rule-of -thumb for value is 560 ohms for a 
high (8-foot) Beverage, down to maybe 270 or 330 ohms for a very low or 
on-ground Beverage.

* The most common problem is bad homebrewed transformers. Mostly, these are 
due to the wrong core (hamfest bargains, gift from another ham, or "what was 
in my junk box"), and sometimes inexperienced builders don't get the 
windings right.  Also, there appear to be some published designs that are 
extremely lossy.

The remedy is to use a foolproof design -- The binocular core types are as 
close to this as you can get, and they work as well or better than 
toroid-wound transformers.

73, Gary
K9AY