Topband: Do beverage antennas work in dense wood?

Michael Zürch dg1cmz at freenet.de
Sat Apr 3 02:28:12 PDT 2010


Hello Topband-fellows,

I hope this question wasn't asked too often before. At our contest QTH 
we always had poor ears on the lowbands due to a lack of RX antennas. 
K9AY and EWE didn't work well due to it is a hilltop location with poor 
ground.

We found a 290m beverage on a clear ridge towards QTF 30° working vy 
well on 160/80/40m. Since we got clearance now to install beverages more 
or less permanently it looks promising to install some more of them.

However except the ridge at 30°, where a road runs parallel, all other 
directions are covered with dense wood. The wood is not cleared after 
storms up there, so this makes a dense mess of wood all around the QTH. 
The good thing is that this keeps away people that could walk into a 
beverage or complain about too much wires around.

Now my question is: would a beverage work if it is put in a height of 
about 3m along trees and passing through a lot of garbage wood?

How much does it effect its operation if its mounted at different 
heights at different plances, e.g. from 2-4m height changing with the 
points to fix the beverage.

According to 
http://www.bavarian-contest-club.de/projects/beverage/bev_script.pdf a 
lenght of about 180m would be ideal for us to have good performance on 
80/40 and still usability on 160m. Also we can't make it too long, since 
the terrain slopes fast, especially towards to the US.

Second question: how much does it effect the performance of a beverage 
when it is mounted on a sloping hill? (I speak of a height difference 
over the lenght of the beverage of maybe 20-40m)

Of course the final performance must be tested in place, but if somebody 
can tell me it won't work at all I can save the time to put it up, which 
would be a nasty task up there.

Thanks for your answers in advance,

73, Michael DG1CMZ


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