Topband: Do beverage antennas work in dense wood?

[Robin]

Run it through the trees, it will work just fine.  Use the slope to your 
advantage, it will tilt the response angle down.  a one wavelength beverage 
is a moderately high angle antenna, 10-15 degrees of downslope will not be 
noticeable.  If the slope is more than that, you can use the slope to help 
hide from signals from behind you

I would go to the effort to avoid electrical contact with the trees, but, 
just insulation will work just fine, no extra measures needed.  For a 
permanent installation, I would probably use real screw base insulators- 
the kind with a ceramic top on a long lag screw. often used for electric 
fence wiring on wood fences.  Use the lineman's method of attaching the 
wire to the insulator, don't run it THROUGH the insulator, that will make 
maintenance very difficult.  Attach the wire with a lineman's wrap, and 
that will allow enough movement that it will tolerate some motion in the 
wind

the beverages at VP6DX were forced through dense brush and used the limbs 
for support.  This worked very well, but would not last years with wind 
moving the wire and chafing through insulation.  Use a 6-8 meter long 
fiberglass collapsible rod used for fishing wires through ceilings and 
attics to help you fish the line through the brush, and support it with the 
insulators I mentioned

Make some of them longer than 180 meters- that is minimum length for any 
performance on 160.  you should have some out to 300-400 meters if 
possible, don't worry of they change slope in the middle, just try to keep 
the wire in a straight line, don't worry about the varying height. remember 
that 320 meters is only 2 wavelengths at topband

do as many as you can. There is no such thing as too many receive antennas 
on topband

73

Robin, WA6CDR

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Michael Zürch" <dg1cmz at freenet.de>
To: <topband at contesting.com>
Sent: Saturday, April 03, 2010 02:28
Subject: Topband: Do beverage antennas work in dense wood?

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)