[TowerTalk] Beverage Antenna

[Patrick Greenlee]

Joe. Thanks for that info.  Your comments and those of others make it to 
start not looking good for putting a Beverage wire a couple feet above 
one of my fences.  I might still try maybe 8 ft above the top wire of 
the fence.  What do you think of that?  Having the Beverage above the 
fence, even at 8 ft or more above the top wire is quite attractive as:
1.  The fence posts would be easier to extend than to come up with anew 
just for the Beverage.
2. We are a working cattle ranch and structures have to withstand cattle 
bumping them or chewing on them (They ate my Dish TV coax, a garden 
hose, and the wires of a remote weather station. It would be a pain to 
have to wrap PVC posts in barbed wire to be able to have them away from 
an existing fence. and then they would be in the way of haying.
3,  Running a Beverage on its own would require an installation with the 
wire's lowest part of its catenary above the reach of the cattle and deer.

A lone T-post or PVC pipe becomes a scratching post and will get shoved 
over.  Our fence posts survive because they have 5 strands of 4 point 
barbed wire stretched tight and secured to them.  It is uncomfortable to 
push on the barbed wire.

If I were to install a Beverage with its own posts then as a minimum I 
would have to have a single strand of hot wire at around 24 inches above 
grade. Then you have to switch the hot wire off to use the antenna 
because of the once a second 10Kv+ pulses and the RF noise you get.  The 
herd would have to be rounded up and put elsewhere because if the hot 
wire is off too long they figure it out and ignore the wire creating 
more repair work to detract from Ham projects. Too much hassle.

Sad story, huh? Not really as there are tradeoffs like room to spare, no 
neighbor closer than 1/4 mile, no permits for antennas or towers, no 
CC&Rs, no homeowner's assoc, you can pee off the front porch and do 
anything you want on the back porch, target shoot up to and over 1000 
meters (or yds) and no one will complain.  The down side is the 
difficulty of finding help. I am one of the two hams in my zip code and 
the other guy is not in good physical shape. There isn't an electronics 
store better than Radio shack (a 2 on a scale of 10) within 100 miles.  
Not a Ham store or store with a ham or electronic hobbyist department to 
my knowledge in the state. Staples is the computer store for this area 
and that is a 60 mile round trip.  Best Buy is nearly a 100 mile round 
trip, and those are the best we have.

Would I want to move closer to civilization.  NO WAY!!!

Many thanks to those who have shared their experience, knowledge and or 
opinions in response to my questions.  I will find a way to experiment 
with a Beverage.

Patrick   NJ5G



On 2/3/2015 7:55 AM, Joe Subich, W4TV wrote:
>
>> I'm curious to know if the fence would act similar to good
>> conductivity dirt WRT Beverage performance.
>
> Anecdotal reports over the years (~ 30?) of Beverage antennas over
> an existing conductive wire/fence indicates that performance lags
> that over moderate earth.  The degradation comes from two apparent
> modes: 1) the (typically larger) fence picks up noise and couples it
> to the Beverage and 2) the the conductive nature of the fence upsets
> the velocity factor (wave tilt) resulting in a shorter effective
> length with lower signal strengths and broader patterns.
>
> 73,
>
>   ... Joe, W4TV
>
>
> On 2015-02-03 8:39 AM, Patrick Greenlee wrote:
>> 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
>>
>>
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