A Beverage antenna is a special receiving antenna particularly well-suited for the lower HF bands. In the CQ WPX Contest, the OM0A team used a Beverage antenna on 80 meters pointing northwest. I had the opportunity to operate on 80 meters on Sunday morning, and the Beverage antenna made a significant difference. In what way?
There isn’t a high level of industrial interference in our area, but the Beverage antenna significantly reduced interference from European stations, making U.S. stations easy to copy, even though the signal didn’t get stronger according to the S-meter. Interference from stations in that direction (especially DL) was also significantly reduced. The benefit of the Beverage antenna over the inverted V was noticeable only with stations from PA and G. The benefit was particularly noticeable in the EU segment, where contact with some US stations would have been very difficult to achieve. So how do you build a Beverage antenna?
Beverage Antenna for 80m
List of materials: two ground stakes (1.5 m), 180 m of solid wire, at least eight 2-meter-high supports made of wood or other insulating material, a 9:1 transformer, and a 470-ohm/2W non-inductive resistor.
From the above, it is clear that a Beverage antenna is quite large (in length). Above all, these dimensions determine the width of the radiation pattern and the vertical angle at which the antenna receives signals. A shorter antenna has lower gain and a wider radiation pattern.
The 9:1 transformer is a key component. It wasn’t easy to find Amidon BN 73-202 dual-hole cores, but I can definitely recommend this transformer based on W8JI’s design. In our version, we’ve also added a bandpass filter and a pre-amplifier.
A significant part of the work involved building the wooden supports. Since the ground is still frozen at the end of March, we secured each one with short wires. It is better to make metal fixtures that are driven into the ground, into which the supports are then inserted. These could be, for example, tubes of a suitable diameter or angle irons with mounting brackets.
I drove the grounding stakes into the ground back in the fall. The connection between the stake and the antenna is made with SK tape.
The antenna wire must be strong enough to withstand the required tension. The antenna should not have large overhangs between the supports, so the wire needs to be taut. Thinner wire will not withstand that tension.
