Yuri, the problem with you arguing Tom's position is that nothing is
said of this glaring difference. It is quite remarkable (or I made
some remarkable mistake or the wire is just too short as I mentioned)
and it DOES denote a dramatic departure from accepted Beverage
characteristics which has been undisclosed as a comment from Tom, if
in fact he offered it. This 8dB loss does make sense in that you have
a leaky transmission line in a death embrace with ground. The wires
would split the power and the lower power contribution would certainly
attempt to warm the worms with more gusto.
[ IF perhaps we were to employ the old twinlead twist every foot or
so, we might find things evened out ;-) ]

I will let that simmer for this evening.

73's
Richard Clark, KB7QHC


Here is the perhaps the best outline of the "problem" by VE7DXR and you might
want to try to plug it into program to see the correlation.
Yuri

Observations done here 8 and 15 years ago using a 600m Beverage on the MW
broadcast band seem to verify the above statement. Even though the DC
resistance of the wire is naturally very low, it was found that the
"counterpoise" lying on the ground underneath the antenna, and connecting the
ground rod at the far end of the Beverage with the ground rod at the receiver
end's matching transformer, in fact, was acting like a "Beverage on Ground",
rather than a short circuit between ground rods. That is, it delivered a signal
to the grounded side of the matching transformer. The result was that signal
strengths often were stronger from transmitters broadside to the antenna (10 dB
or so), the occasional solid nulls on signals from the back of the antenna were
degraded, and little increase in signal strength from signals from the far end
of the antenna were observed.

Those of us who performed this experiment stopped using "counterpoises" from
that point forward, unless we used them as antennas in their own right.
best wishes,
Nick, VE7DXR