Topband: BOG & transformer

[Gary Smith]

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