[TowerTalk] Advice: Beverage Wire

[w8ji.tom]

Hi Bill, Pete and All.

> At 09:04 AM 12/14/98 -0500, Bill Fisher - W4AN wrote:
> >
> >
> >I have a need for wire for use with beverages that has the following
> >qualities:
> >
> >1) Easily fixed when broken.  Aluminum electric fence wire is excellent
in
> >this regard.  No soldering required ever. 

I dislike the aluminum oxide problems. I avoid it for that reason. 

I've used #16 PVC insulated wire, brown or green. Hard to see and easy to
splice, like N4KG I just tie it in a knot and twist and solder. The nice
thing is the insulation keeps the wire clean, making it easy to solder for
emergency repairs.

> I've been disappointed in my aluminum fence wire beverage.  I have had to
> repair it several times, probably because it's not 1.1 deer high,
> especially in the end sections that taper to ground level. 

Tapering the height does nothing at all for performance, so far as I've
even been able to tell. All that stuff about reducing vertical pickup seems
to be pathological science.

Consider an antenna several hundred feet long with uniform current. The
very small percentage of length at the ends is meaningless. Not only that,
the entire antenna responds to vertically polarized signals anyway!  If
that isn't enough, the long sloping ends offer just the same accumulated
response as a sharp bend and vertical drop anyway.

I spare myself aggravation and liability, and just do "protected" vertical
drops down the sides of trees.

In almost 30 years of playing with hundreds of Beverages, the only things
I've found important are:

1.) Proper termination

2.) Keeping transmit antennas at least a few hundred feet away from them
when possible

3.) Proper grounding

4.) Proper feedline decoupling (to prevent common mode currents from
"pumping" the ground terminal of the Beverage with RF).

73 Tom

--
FAQ on WWW:               http://www.contesting.com/towertalkfaq.html
Submissions:              towertalk@contesting.com
Administrative requests:  towertalk-REQUEST@contesting.com
Problems:                 owner-towertalk@contesting.com
Search:                   http://www.contesting.com/km9p/search.htm