AC9KH
Member
It is a 127ft, vertically polarized. You can look at my QRZ page, there's some photos there.
End fed random wire
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It is a 127ft, vertically polarized. You can look at my QRZ page, there's some photos there.
AC9KH
Member
Joel, I'd like to note that typically a Beverage antenna is not going to work all that good for transmitting. Unlike a regular transmitting antenna, the Beverage requires poor ground conductivity and all your power will be used by the terminating resistor. I have a Beverage here that consists of about 1 5/8 miles of electric fence wire. I use it only for receive on 160, 630 and 2200 meters. I have the Beverage on Ant 2 on the Flex, and the EFW on Ant 1, so depending on the configuration in the Flex I can TX/RX on the EFW or I can transmit on the EFW and RX on the Beverage.
The SWR on the Beverage is >25 and while it has a very good SNR for receive, I've never tried tuning it up to see if I can transmit on it. I doubt it would even tune, therefore I don't run the lead wire for the Beverage thru the tuner.
Typically, transmit antennas used on 630 or 2200 are loaded verticals. A half-wave dipole or end-fed on 2200 would be about 3,600 ft long and the tallest man-made structure on earth would not be able to get such an antenna to the required height to get it to work with horizontal polarization. But the Beverage is the most popular receive antenna for 630/2200, and also quite popular on 160.
43-ft wire vertical with an SGC230 at the base. About 30 radials on the ground, length varying between 22 ft and 50 ft, An 8-ft ground rod.
I'm not saying it's ideal, and maybe wasn't my first choice, but it was practical within the constraints of my yard and used items I already had. But with it I got DXCC on all HF bands but 80M and 30M. (30M due to noisy environment, 80M because I used to have a day job and couldn't stay up all night). 100W max, CW and SSB.
When I couldn't get thru on 12 and 10M using that vertical, I had a 20'V x 70'H Inverted-L with 20 radials on the ground that often did surprisingly well on those bands, plus being good for 75M and 40M regional use.
If you can put an autotuner at the feedpoint of a wire antenna, I think what I was told years ago is worth repeating. "Put as much wire up as you can, up as high as you can".
I'm not saying it's ideal, and maybe wasn't my first choice, but it was practical within the constraints of my yard and used items I already had. But with it I got DXCC on all HF bands but 80M and 30M. (30M due to noisy environment, 80M because I used to have a day job and couldn't stay up all night). 100W max, CW and SSB.
When I couldn't get thru on 12 and 10M using that vertical, I had a 20'V x 70'H Inverted-L with 20 radials on the ground that often did surprisingly well on those bands, plus being good for 75M and 40M regional use.
If you can put an autotuner at the feedpoint of a wire antenna, I think what I was told years ago is worth repeating. "Put as much wire up as you can, up as high as you can".
Yea, it will tune but you will need to make a tuner for 630 and 2200 meters, or good luck finding one.
When I think of an "end fed" wire antenna, I default to thinking of an end fire horizontal antenna. As with a dipole, I default to horizontal antenna thinking. Which affects how the discussion of end fed random wire vs dipole discussion that has taken place.
Thanks
Joel
I wonder if everyone can keep this in mind when talking about antenna "reciprocity".
Thanks
Joel
AC9KH
Member
Virtually everything for 630 and 2200 is homemade. My beverage is just the top wire on our line fence. Which at one point maybe 20-25 years ago was an electric fence wire. I replaced a few of the insulators on it that were broken and turned it into a beverage.
If I went thru all the head scratching to build a matching network for it, it still wouldn't be heard on either 630 or 2200 meters with WSPR. I'd be better off to base load my existing 127' vertical EFW. And even that would be so inefficient on 2200 meters that it would likely require about 25 watts in to get the 1W EIRP limit out of it.
630 meters is more doable on the vertical EFW.
AC9KH
Member
EFW can be either vertical or horizontal. So can a dipole, but it's really not that practical to try to center-feed a vertical. Especially when you get down to 75 meters where the supports for your feedline are going to be more extensive than the supports for the antenna. If you're going to do a vertical dipole, may as well lower it closer to the ground and string the lower half it out as a counterpoise. Voila! you got a 1/4 wave Marconi - get rid of the balun and just tune it up by cutting the wire to the right length for velocity factor.
The latter is what I did for my 160 vertical. I ended up not needing any counterpoise wires. Tried it and it didn't make any difference, our soil type conducts RF very well with just a ground rod. When I switch it to a EFHW on 80 meters it doesn't need a counterpoise. The antenna is electrically complete and just switches polarity every cycle.
On 40 meters it's an end-fed full wave and develops an extra lobe on its radiation pattern. But so does a half-wave dipole run on 2x its fundamental frequency.
Hams go with horizontals because they are easy and work "good enough". Verticals are more of a challenge. But once you get down to 75 meters and lower verticals are less of a challenge than getting a horizontal high enough. Unless all you're doing is NVIS nets - then you'll want a horizontal.
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Ever try a balloon like car lot flag supporters ? Only way I coud find to support a vertical wire for 630.
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SGC230 can tune a shopping cart. Had one with about 300 foot of wire strung through the pine trees, wish I'd have kept that.
I have an Icom AT-140 now, just about as good.
AC9KH
Member
If I'm not mistaken, isn't that how Marconi supported his vertical that he used to transmit across the Atlantic back in 1901?
One potential problem with that is that it might be higher than the 60 meters height that the FCC allows for 630/2200 meter antennas.
What happens at merlin's place stays at merlin's place.
AC9KH
Member
They're so worried about PLC interference on those bands that they got them basically unusable. On 2200 I've picked up FST4 but there's only about 20 stations around the world transmitting on that band. 630 is a little more active, but again the only thing I've ever picked up on 630 is FST4. There's some stations in Russia that run WSPR on 630 but I've never picked any of them up.
AC9KH
Member
The MF and LF bands are all pretty much the same. There's monitors on the bands for WSPR, but nobody actually transmitting, and some don't even have Tx capability. I put out a single Tx on 160 at 500 milliwatts and was heard across the U.S. tonight. But there's only four of us on the band that are actually transmitting in the last hour.
