Topband: Beverages through the forest

[HA0DU Steve]

Dear All,

When 12 years ago we moved to a one-hectar farm in the middle of a 
20,000 hectar forest, I had doubts if I can make antennas tall enough to 
"be heard". I also saw that the maximum wire length within my property 
was about  140 meters in the diagonal.  I needed something longer, so I 
looked around...
Our only neighbor was the forester, who told me I can hang up wires 
anywhere, any length, provided nobody gets strangled. So I used the 
unlimited space to install 11 identical Beverages, each 176 meters long. 
I made some comparison tests and found that over sandy terrain the 
optimum height was 10 to 12 feet. I am also using #12 AWG stranded 
insulated wire.

Over the years maintaining 11 wires became unnecessary, so today I only 
have 3 (NW, NE and S), but each of them are 1,600 feet long. (For TX5C I 
had to extend the NW Bev to 2,400 feet). I also changed the hanging 
method. Originally I attached the wire to the trees by thin nylon ropes 
(bailer rope), so the wires were really zig-zagging. Instead now I put 
pieces of bailer rope between pairs of old trees along the path, and the 
Bev wire is attached to these, which results in less zig-zagging and 
larger distances from trees. The ropes are a little loose, so even if 
these old trees are moving in the wind, the ropes are not broken. I may 
be wrong but I thought perhaps when the wire is very close to a live 
tree it forms some kind of a capacitor and I did not like it. With the 
new method I have about 40-50 suspension points at each of the Bevs, and 
maintenance is easy, using a small stepladder and a reel of bailing rope 
in a backpack.

Although I have a preamplifier, I do not use it very often, it is just 
not necessary in such a low noise environment. There is no other house 
with electricity in a 1 km radius and our electricity supply is a ground 
cable. In fact when there is something very important, I even turn 
refrigerators and all other household electrical equipment temporarily 
off, so that I minimize the man-made noise. For the eleven Beverages I 
also used to have a selector switch, but now I just connect the right 
antenna coax to the RX ant input of my receiver.

If it works? Yes indeed, I tried all kinds of small receiving antennas 
including pennants, flags, magnetic loops, slinkies, mostly everything I 
found in the literature, but the Beverage outperformed all of them. Very 
soon you can listen to some of the recordings I made on 160 meters at 
http://ha0du.com

Best 73
Steve HA0DU