Topband: Soliciting suggestions on our receive antennas for 5X8C

Herb Schoenbohm herbs at vitelcom.net
Sun Feb 10 10:57:10 EST 2013


Dave,  You signals are great on 160 night after night with QSB of 
course.  You might wish to try some spider wires hooked to you ground 
both at the feed point and the termination point. Four or five wires 
about 60 feet or more fanned out in the RX direction should stabilize 
the need for a ground. BTW  I have two Beverages your way and the 900 
foot does very well but the 500 foot is worthless.  The same results on 
80 meters but not as severe.  The spider approach will help in 
establishing better earthing stability on both ends of the Beverage.  
any wire will do even pieces of CAT 5 cable with the wires twisted 
together and laying on the ground.

If you have additional ground rods of even pieces of rebar you can add 
to your ground in a five foot distance from the main termination.  
Improving the grounding on each end may help your situation.  Also make 
sure your Beverage run is not near any other noise source or vertical 
antennas.  At least a 100-200 foot separation may help in your 
circumstance.

On behalf of all those you have worked and the hopeful still trying, the 
greatest respect for putting Uganda on the air on TB and concentrating 
on 160 as you have.  So many DX-peditions just give up after the first 
problem working stations on TB and look for a higher Q-rate on higher 
bands.  Your devotion to 160 is awesome.

Regards,

Herb Schoenbohm, KV4FZ






On 2/10/2013 5:05 AM, Dave wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> My team is currently on DXpedition to Uganda 5X8C
>
> We have erected receive antennas here in 5X with very poor success. W e have used the same antennas at other places with great success.  Please read below and if you can offer some constructive suggestions please reply to me and copy reflector.  Davek4sv at yahoo.com
>
>
> We are experiencing some weird problems with our receive antennas.  We have a beverage about 540 feet long, terminated properly about 5 to 6 feet over the ground.  I have built plenty of these at my house, they all work.  This one here does not.  It hears noise but no signals.  Once In a while you can hears signals.
>
> So put you're receive antenna hat on.  We suspect the ground is the problem.  We are located on the shore of Victoria Lake at a resort.  The soil appears to be sandy but with fresh water lake nearby. 200 feet.  The beverage is in the clear away from large metal objects.
>
> With a 510 ohm termination we measure about 235 ohms when looking across the termination resistor.  Using resistor theory essentially we have two resistances in parallel.  The wire , termination transformer, ground rods and ground are about 500 ohms.  Having not measured this at home I'm not sure if this is too low or too high of resistance.
>
> We erected a Flag 29x14 feet mounted just above the ground.  This is purported to be ground independent.  Our tests last night indicate this antenna is not hearing very well either.
>
> We are soliciting suggestions.  We only have a small amount of wire and other antenna stuff, no Home Depot or Radio Shack around.  Perhaps we can build a ground independent antenna that does not care what it sits on.
>
> We have or can source some wooden poles to make wire radiators.
>
> The 5X8C team thanks you in I
>
>
>
> Thank You in Advance,
>
> Dave Anderson, 5X/K4SV
>
> Sent from my iPad in Uganda
> _________________
> Topband Reflector



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