"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.

"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

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.

In TN I had 25 acres and ran a 200+ ft long wire which was enough to pick up
the Nashville stations. I once connected my antenna to the electric fence
wire (after disconnecting the charger) that ran around about 1/2 of the
place. Didn't do much.

Here I have 16 acres which means I could, in theory, run about 2,000 ft of
wire. Still I was thinking of something a little smaller.

no spam wrote:
"For 690 KHz that would be 2850 feet of wire, just over 1/2 mile of
wire."

Something like that. The site was a shortwave broadcast plant that had a
rhombic aimed at New York for last ditch program relay in case all else
failed. It was located at a far corner of many acres to be well out of
the shortwave field. As we were not last ditching it, I borrowed its
open wire transmission line, shorted it and fed it to my medium wave
receiver. It worked like a champ.

Best regards, Richard Harrison, KB5WZI