Topband: Beverage on Ground

[Ashton Lee]

No, I didn't spill my beer. 

But I am having very good experience with the roughly 300 foot Beverage on Ground that I just put in at my house. It is fed through a 300 ohm transformer and runs in the only direction where I can get a 300 foot run. It is made of insulated #14 wire and unterminated, as I would prefer a more omnidirectional pattern since I can have only the one compromise receive antenna. Also I couldn't get a ground rod in to experiment with. In Western Colorado we aren't all that big on soil… but we sure have great rocks.

So far the BOG out receives both a K9AY I had up briefly (which, of necessity, was probably too close to my transmitting antenna) and a tuned loop I tried.

Now I want to put up a similar antenna on the remote hilltop where I have a cabin and "contest site-lite". That location is ideal for transmitting antennas since it is on the absolute top of a mountain with cliffs down to the North and East of the property, and steep hillside to the South and West. But it makes running Beverages a bit of a trick. I also have 200 elk running around so it isn't easy to install wires above ground. This whole place is on rocks dusty soil where getting any sort of grounding requires a jack hammer. So I want to install one or two BOG's there as well. Which prompts several questions:

1) Should I again use insulated wire or can I use the cheap electric fence wire I can get at our ranch coop?

2) How do I get enough signal to noise without getting excessively directional. Is there anything like an optimal length for a less directional BOG?

3) My first experimental BOG works much better on 160 than 80. Is there anything unusual about that or that I should do differently?

4) I have essentially no local noise in either my regular home or at the cabin. So I am mostly concerned with suppressing atmospheric noise. Any implications for that in my design.

I know that both my current and my contemplated antennas are sub-optimal. But a lot of what you have to do on 160 is less than optimal if you live anywhere but a large farm. The first test antenna is working so much better than receiving on my transmit antenna that I think sub-optimal antennas, of a reasonable quality, can work pretty well for me.

Incidentally for anyone experimenting with BOGs I am using an old MFJ active antenna tuner on the antenna I just built. It serves as a preselector and possibly a preamp it would seem. It gives me better performance than sending the antenna directly into the rig. One always suspects that if an MFJ product works OK there could be something else which would work a lot better. But early days so far. So far the BOG really cuts down on the noise while giving me enough signal.

After all the help I got yesterday with one antenna question I was prompted to ask another.

KQ0C
Ash