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Old May 10th 07, 07:57 PM posted to rec.radio.amateur.antenna
Michael Black Michael Black is offline
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First recorded activity by RadioBanter: Jul 2006
Posts: 322
Default How to make an antenna for receiving (only) broadcast AM

"no spam" ) writes:
"Beverage antennas are highly directional."

Living in Portugal in the 1950`s, I used a Beverage antenna to listen to
the CBS Evening News from WCBS in New York, and WWL in New Orleans.
Whenever one station faded, I just rocked the dial and the other station
would be there. Portugal is on Greenwich time so the Evening News was
around midnight local time. By then, most of the Europeans had signed
off.

All you must have for a Beverage antenna is a long wire, say 2
wavelengths long, aimed at the targeted broadcaster.


For 690 KHz that would be 2,850 feet of wire, just over 1/2 a mile of wire.


WHen he said "all you need" I was tempted to add "and space for that antenna".

Of course, some people are lucky. You do hear of people doing really well
with really long wire antennas, and presumably they have such great success
because few have the space to have similar antennas.

There was a guy in Australia forty years ago, Ray Knaughton (I'm sure
I've misspelled that), who did moonbounce with rhombic antennas. He
lived in the outback, so he had the space. Got enough gain to overcome
Australia's 150W power limit at the time (I think it was that low). He
had enough space for putting up high gain rhombics for various VHF bands.
The big problem was that since they weren't steerable, he had a big limit
on when he could do moonbounce, since the moon wasn't in the right place
most of the time.

Michael VE2BVW