[TowerTalk] TowerTalk Digest, Vol 158, Issue 20

[Patrick Greenlee]

Rick, I have cross fences which run E-W and N-S diving the ranch into 4 
equal square chunks of 40 acres each.  These fences are, of course, 1/2 
mile long.  They are 5 wire barbed wire with  T-posts roughly on 15 ft 
centers.  I was thinking of attaching extensions to the T-posts to get 
more elevation for the Beverage as the T-posts' tops are at about 4 1/3 
ft above ground.  If te antenna were to pass by  a gate it would  have 
to be elevated to at least 10 ft for a distance of 20 ft or so to allow 
for gentle bends.

I am in a zone listed as 30 mmhos/meter conductivity as depicted by the 
recently discussed map and do well with a Hy-Gain Hy-Tower multi-band 
vertical atop a metal barn with no radials, just the barn as counterpoise.

I think maybe I need to study Beverage antennas significantly more 
before committing much time and material to any "large scale" 
experimentation.  If a shielded magnetic loop would do nearly as well it 
might be a better choice for the next experiment after the two in 
process tower projects.

Patrick        NJ5G

On 2/10/2016 10:23 AM, Richard (Rick) Karlquist wrote:
> On 2/10/2016 6:56 AM, Patrick Greenlee wrote:
>
>> Now regarding Beverage antennas... Please excuse my ignorance (The
>> cowboy philosopher Will Rogers said, "We are all ignorant, just about
>> different things") but could someone please give me a little detail on
>> Beverage antennas being poor performers in areas of higher soil
>> conductivity? I have the real estate (160 acre 1/2 mile by 1/2 mile
>> black Angus ranch) and have looked forward to experimenting with
>
>> Patrick        NJ5G
>>
>>> On my own land, I think the FCC map has it right.  Verticals work
>>> great, and beverages barely play.
>>>
>>> Rick N6RK
>>> _______________________________________________
>
> Well, you have me beat; I only have 20 acres, 1/4 mile by 1/8 mile. 
> When I first acquired the property, one of the first things I did was
> to put up a 1/4 mile long beverage (about 1300 feet).  It ran
> east and west, conforming to the property, which conveniently
> allowed me to test it on 2.5 MHz using WWV in CO and WWVH in HI.
> I got the wire installed, but had not put in the termination resistors.
> I was anxious to listen to it, so I tried it unterminated by
> carrying a radio and gel cell the the back of the property.  To
> my surprise, it heard WWV well, and was deaf to WWVH.  I then moved
> the radio to the east end, and the result was that it heard WWVH
> well, and was deaf to WWV.  The beverage was self terminated!
> Like a 2 meter dummy load consisting of 100's of feet of small coax.  I
> eventually did an experiment where I put a relay at the 400 foot
> point of the beverage and A/B'ed a 400 ft length vs 1300 feet.
> The extra 900 feet was doing nothing other than acting as a
> ~500 ohm termination resistor.  There was no change in received audio
> as the relay was switched.  I confirmed this by exciting the beverage
> with a signal generator and measuring the current along the length.
> Sure enough, the current was significantly attenuated after 400 feet.
> The result is that beverages are too short to work well on 160 meters.
> They start to play on 80 meters.  On 40 meters, they are "magic"
> listening to long path to Europe in the morning, because they are
> "long" on that band.
>
> Rick N6RK