I just put up my first Beverage, using aluminum electric fence wire. It's
about 280 feet long (max for my property), 7 feet high, with a 440 ohm
terminating resistor and a K2ZJ beverage box (with pre-amp) at the other
end. The feedline from the ZJ box to the shack has a 50-core common mode
choke on the box end. Connections between the ZJ box and the antenna, and
between it and the terminating resistor, were flooded with Noalox.
So far, I'm not terribly impressed. Signals in the desired direction are
down a couple of S-units, which is tolerable, and the thing appears to have
some directivity (i.e. signals in non-desired directions are down more) but
the signal-to-noise ratio does not seem significantly better than on my
vertically-polarized 4-element parasitic array.
I did have to run the antenna under one of my guy sets not too far from the
anchor -- a couple of feet vertical spacing, roughly at right angles, and
it passes about 70 feet from the base of my tower. Is coupling to the guy
(unbroken till near the tower) and resultant noise pickup likely? Am I
just hoping for more than a Beverage can give? Or do I need a longer time
series before I can make that judgement?
73, Pete Smith N4ZR
In wild, wonderful, fairly rare WEST Virginia
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