It was time to investigate another receiving antenna and beverage was a must to try. The question was "how fill out a beveragemong trees ?". The only answer was "try it!"

I took a look at ON4UN low band Dxing and at the W8JI (www.w8ji.com) the web site; both are are full of information and clear indications on what and how to set up beverages.

The length is 178 meters which is 2 wl for 80 meter and 1wl fr 160.

From the mechanical point of view the beverage I set-up use single conductor electric copper wire, easy to work and with enough mechanical stenght.

For support wire I found Bamboos for garden; they work fine and you pay them few euros.

They stand up 2 meters.

On the top of each bamboo support I put a open hook, inside which I make the wire going in. I allow the wire to "float" through the insulators and I can tension the entire antenna from either end.

As trasformer I use a couple of MN8CX cores which use 4 turns for primay and 3x4 turns for the secondary. ON4UN provided them to me some times ago.

As resistor I tried with a 680 Ohm resistor mounted in an half plastic tube; it works fine in my set-up (tuning is fine and no overload problem arised).

Grounding is important and I adopted twos ground poles I bougth in an electrical warehouse; they are 1 meter long and I put one at the beginning and one at the end of the wire..

Tuning method

For tuning I used the following method with my antenna SWR analyser MFJ 259B: 

• I connected the antenna analyzer at the Beverage feedpoint through the matching transformer

• I sweeped the analyzer frequency from 1.8 to 7 MHz (or over a ~4:1 frequency range near the frequency intended for antenna) while watching SWR

• I adjusted the termination for minimum SWR variation (not minimum SWR, minimum SWR variation!)

When installation (including grounds) and termination is proper, SWR VALUE remained nearly the same regardless of frequency.