[TowerTalk] Beverage vs what?

[Pete Smith]

Even though I have 5 acres of land to work with, the shape of the property
is such that the longest Beverages I can install, aimed at either Europe or
North Asia, are less than 300 ft long.  My reading suggests that this is
probably too short for 80 meters, and certainly for 160.  With that in
mind, I'm looking at alternatives.

My current transmit antenna on 80 is a 4-element K3LR-style parasitic
array, whose pattern closely resembles a 4-square.  The probem is that the
patterns of a short beverage, a EWE and a K9AY loop look just about the
same as that of my transmit antenna.  Gain aside, I'm wondering if I can
expect any better signal to noise performance from them than I now get
listening on the transmit antenna.

There are some anecdotes suggesting that a Beverage works better than its
pattern would suggest because it discriminates against vertically-polarized
energy, which my transmit antenna clearly does not.  Anything to this?  I
found no discussion of this phenomenon (?) in ON4UN's book.

Finally, if a Beverage really is meaningfully better, has anyone compared a
traditional Beverage of the right length to a helical "Slinky" Beverage?

73,  Pete N4ZR

Don't forget to update your entry in the World Contest Station Database
http://206.102.70.3/search.htm


--
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