Beverage Antennas

[splitrockara]

From our great DXer member Jay K2TTT(C6ATT)

Thank you, Larry W2SWX

This morning Larry (W2SWX) asked a question about beverage antennas and I thought it would be good to explain a bit about them (Wikipedia)
So the next time a ham says to you that he has a beverage that he is not talijg about a Cold One..or is he?

At my station I have 3 listening antennas (1 loop and 2 beverages) the beverages are as follows: a 1,000 foot NE/SW beverage which is quite directive and A 370 foot beverage at 270 degrees which is good for VK/ZL and works quite well. The loop is a K9AY receiving loop which looks like 4 delta loops In 4 directions.

These antennas function quite well for listening on the low bands (80 and 160) the most noticeable effect is the reduction of atmospheric and man made noise which are quite noticeable on those bands. The beverages give me the opportunity to hear stations that would not even be discernible on the transmitting antennas.

Any questions please let me know

The Beverage antenna is a long wire receiving antenna mainly used in the low frequency and medium frequency radio bands, invented by Harold H. Beverage in 1921. It is used by amateur radio, shortwave listening, and longwave radio DXers and military applications.

A Beverage antenna consists of a horizontal wire from one-half to two wavelengths long (hundreds of feet at HF to several kilometres for longwave) suspended above the ground, with the feedline to the receiver attached to one end and the other terminated through a resistor to ground. The antenna has a unidirectional radiation pattern with the main lobe off the resistor-terminated end, so that end is pointed at the transmitter region. Some Beverage antennas use a two-wire design that allows reception in two directions from a single Beverage antenna. Other designs use sloped ends where the center of the antenna is six to eight feet high and both ends of the antenna gradually slope downwards towards the termination resistor and matching transformer.

The advantages of the Beverage are excellent directivity, and wider bandwidth than resonant antennas. It’s disadvantages are its physical size, requiring considerable land area, and inability to rotate to change the direction of reception. Installations often use multiple antennas to provide wide azimuth coverage.

The Beverage antenna consists of a horizontal wire one-half to several wavelengths long, suspended close to the ground, usually 10 to 20 feet high, pointed in the direction of the signal source. At the end toward the signal source it is terminated by a resistor to ground approximately equal in value to the characteristic impedance of the antenna considered as a transmission line, usually 400 to 800 ohms. At the other end it is connected to the receiver through a transmission

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