Expired beverage

Sad thing is that because of a bunch of crazy stuff in my personal life I've not had time to operate much or blog at all.  Around early December, I finally got a Beverage antenna up (with respects to the late Dr. H. H. Beverage).  I just took out the portion of it that crossed the rented land for the farmer.  I used it three times.  Apparently I have a strong noise source in my house somewhere that I have to debug (uugh), but I was able to phase it out with my modded MFJ-1025.  I had a bit over 1000' feet up in December...

Above is the portion of the plowed field.  I took that out last Sunday  :O(  But I still have about 700' left in the woods and it appears I can expand it out in another 200-250' year around.  :O)

My house and garage are oriented NE of the antenna, of course, so the two wire is needed.  With the local noise source that worked out well anyway.

Above is the section in the woods.  I can go farther.  If I can get my neighbor to agree to let me go into his land a little I can get back the 300' or so feet I lost in the field.  If not, I can go 800-900' permanently.

In  the Midwest, our ground is a little better than is posted in most of the handbooks.  It appears on better soil, longer Beverages work better than on either coasts.  My 1000' long one was FAR INFERIOR to my friend Jeff Woods, W0ODS 1/2+ mi long antennas on almost all bands.  I could hear Algeria on Long Wave with this antenna-- it was full quieting on his.  He's heard Commando Solo in Afghanistan at 3 MHz before on one of his Beverages.  It's cool stuff if you live in the country.

He taught me the appropriate method of constructing these to survive the rather windy Iowa winters..  That is 16 ga Aluminum electric fence wire.  Proper fence posts (cast, not "bent") and 1-1/2 PVC, no smaller.  Holes to run the wires through with slits cut in with a hacksaw (or in my lazy case a diamond saw from Harbor Freight with the holes Dremelled out).  Here is a picture:

This works out really well.  The transformers were homebrew.  I use "Balun" type cores, mix 73 because I had them... two cores wrapped together.  The MFJ antenna analyzer is very useful for proving them out before hooking them up.  I ought to post something about that but that'll take time I don't have now.

Anyway.. the sad thing is I used this 3 times during my Christmas break and that's it.  I miss ham radio and writing about it.  Maybe I'll get back to it again.

I can run a shorter one year around.  But the bad thing is that I need like 300' of RG-6 (times two) to get to the wood part of the Beverage.  Ideally, a remote controlled phase box with the Beverage pre-amped would be the ideal setup.  I don't think anyone makes one.  Yet..  Another project I can start and never finish... sigh.  But it would be cool to have a phase box at the beverage termination (at the right impedance w/o a transformer at the fed end even) and then amplify out the 300' of cable.. it's a receive antenna anyway so it's very possible.

In the mean time I'm going to post a few words about a relatively new hobby I can do at least 1x a day.. that's coffee.  I'm going to start a new blog, "Cheapskate Coffee" and write a little about the beginnings of Specialty coffee and home roasting but without spending a fortune.  I will eventually spend a fortune on that too I suppose.. but not yet.

Until next time.. hopefully not 6 months... 73