Towertalk
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: [TowerTalk] Beverage Antenna

To: towertalk@contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] Beverage Antenna
From: Patrick Greenlee <patrick_g@windstream.net>
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2015 14:28:41 -0600
List-post: <towertalk@contesting.com">mailto:towertalk@contesting.com>
Gary, Maybe not a split rail but I have plans for a three rail vinyl fence in front of the house and it will pass near the barn where my multi-channel remote control coaxial antenna relays are located. The plan it to put electric fence wire between the decorative rails to discourage stock from pushing the fence over. I exclude the herd from this particular pasture from spring greenup time till well after the grass recofvers from (typically) July haying. Maybe I can dual purpose the wire and share it so that it can be switched into Beverage mode or electric fence mode. Then the question becomes: is it OK to have dual parallel conductors vertically stacked with a couple feet of separation for a Beverage antenna?

If I use only one of the wires as an antenna, then what? Would the choice of best wire be made based on knowledge and theory or try and see? Decision decisions... I guess I will have to bite the bullet and load up the antenna modeling program that came with the ARRL antenna handbook (I think,)

 Patrick   NJ5G


On 2/3/2015 1:17 PM, Gary - AB9M wrote:
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@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@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@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



_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk

_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk

_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk
_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk

_______________________________________________



_______________________________________________
TowerTalk mailing list
TowerTalk@contesting.com
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/towertalk

<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>