[TowerTalk] Beverage Antenna

Tue Feb 3 14:17:01 EST 2015

Patrick,

It'd  be much better if you could replace the barbed wire fence with a split 
rail or other non-conductive material fence. I once stapled hook up wire 
along the top rail of a split rail fence running on three sides of my acre 
lot ( two sides 120' x one side 240'). Running a single wire to the shack 
and Dentron 160 - AT Transmatch, I used a noise bridge to set the output 
impedance for the AUX Antenna jack of my Corsair-II to 50 Ohms on 80 & 75 
meters.  The low wire may not have been a true Beverage, but it was a very 
low noise antenna which allowed me to work 4X on SSB at my Sunset. I 
received a couple skeptical on the air comments from others who couldn't 
even hear the Israel end, but I have the QSLs.

ON4UN's Low Band DXing book or the ARRL Antenna Handbook, provide the the 
theory; try to NOT deviate too far in your application, unless you want the 
results to deviate far too much from your expectations.

73 & DX,

Gary - AB9M

-----Original Message----- 
From: Patrick Greenlee
Sent: Tuesday, February 03, 2015 7:39 AM
To: towertalk at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Beverage Antenna

Chuck, A very good point.

That is the essence of my interest in the effect of having some parallel
grounded conductors (5 strand barbed wire fence with steel posts) a
short (TBD) distance below the beverage antenna. I'm curious to know if
the fence would act similar to good conductivity dirt WRT Beverage
performance.

If not, then what if the antenna wire were mounted above 3 parallel but
horizontally spaced conductors looking for the beginnings of the effect
that would be achieved theoretically with our old friend the infinite
conductive plane over which we mount our verticals?  Why 3?  Because it
would be easy to put a strand of wire on either side of the top strand
of barbed wire using readily available inexpensive plastic insulating
arms made expressly for adding electric fence wire to a fence built with
T-posts. With a little more fussing I could attach 2 wires either side
of the center wire giving a better approximation of the infinite plane.
One of our experts can maybe tell  me if the parallel grounded wires
need to be tied together laterally or if that would matter.

Patrick      NJ5G

On 2/3/2015 7:00 AM, Chuck Dietz wrote:
> Part of the problem with comparisons of low band receiving antennas made 
> in
> various locations is that the composition of the ground under the antenna
> makes a huge difference.
>
> Chuck W5PR
>
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015 at 8:22 PM, Roger (K8RI) on TT 
> <K8RI-on-TowerTalk at tm.net
>> wrote:
>> That's why I have the  HB and Antenna HB on the same machine as the mail.
>> Items, topics, and components are so much easier and faster to find than
>> with hard print.  Less than 10 keystrokes to find nearly any specifics on 
>> a
>> topic. Course as some of my answers have shown, I'm too lazy to always
>> double check!
>>
>> I can't say the computer is smaller, lighter, or cheaper at 60#, 23"H X
>> 7.5"W X 20" D, running 8  64 bit cores/CPUs @ 4.1 GHz, & 16 GB of  RAM 
>> and
>> cost less than half our first color TV. OTOH  the Internet has been a POS
>> this past week, so I'm glad I had most of the data here.  Still, with
>> posted links on mans news groups, they came up invalid (err 404) even 
>> from
>> news sites and some ham pages were taking so long to load they timed out.
>> I don't think I was getting more than a fraction of the 100 Mbs service I
>> pay for.
>>
>> Speaking of "pay for" and I think this is relevant to hams who depend on
>> electricity... My electric use in the shop has been down this past year 
>> and
>> on the equalized billing plan It almost doubled last month (with less 
>> use)
>> I think I smell a rate increase a coming.
>>
>> 73
>>
>> Roger  (K8RI)
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/2/2015 2:14 PM, Jim Brown wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon,2/2/2015 10:05 AM, Don wrote:
>>>
>>>> First, I'm surprised there does not seem to be any published
>>>> measurements taken at a common test site of a Beverage at various 
>>>> heights
>>>> and lengths (such as done with yagi's, and other antennas on test 
>>>> ranges).
>>>>
>>> Why do you assume that nothing like this exists? Beverages have been
>>> around for nearly a century, and it is quite likely that there's a lot 
>>> of
>>> published work that you haven't looked for in scientific journals. It's
>>> also possible to model antennas like this and do your own study. There's 
>>> a
>>> lot about Beverages (and other RX antennas) in the ON4UN book, and in 
>>> the
>>> ARRL Antenna Book.
>>>
>>> Email reflectors like this one should not be a substitute for pulling 
>>> out
>>> the books and studying them. Many of us who post answers to questions 
>>> like
>>> this have done that study, or done that modeling, or built those 
>>> antennas,
>>> and are sharing what we've learned. As VE7RF has noted, optimum height 
>>> is a
>>> function of wavelength. When a Beverage is higher than that, it doesn't
>>> stop working, like throwing a switch, it just becomes less effective. My
>>> 550 ft Beverages, a full wavelength on 160M, at an average height of 5-6
>>> ft, are quite effective on 40M, and are still working on 20M! How do I
>>> know? I run diversity with my K3 using the TX dipole at 125 ft into the
>>> main RX and the Beverage into the second RX.
>>>
>>> 73, Jim K9YC
>>> _______________________________________________
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> TowerTalk mailing list
>>> TowerTalk at contesting.com
>>> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
>>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> 73
>>
>> Roger (K8RI)
>>
>>
>> ---
>> This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
>> http://www.avast.com
>>
>>
>>
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