Chuck Hutton might have a clearer explanation of the effect of the
salt water off the top of his head Aaron, if he wants to check
in. Beverages "work" because of the approaching wave front being
tilted by "dragging" along non-conductive ground (to be simplistic),
but the conductive salt water doesn't tilt the wave front nearly so
much. Mind you, many of our desired signals are already tilted by
the way they are propagated, so...
I have actually used a 1000' wire along a Pacific coast pier in
southern California many years ago, and heard TP's but it was a bit
of a fly by night (or at least by sunrise) operation, so I wasn't
able to compare it with anything else, or do a serious study of its
directivity.
As for the "pickup coil" idea, I think you would be better off to use
a 9:1 transformer (make it an autotransformer if you can't get an
external ground, presumably to the salt water) to connect to the
QSR1. With the Degen, you'd need to experiment...maybe coil some
wire around the radio, one end to the "Beverage", one end to the
ground of the Degen, battery negative terminal or headphone jack
sleeve. Pretty hit and miss I'd guess.
best wishes,
Nick
At 16:58 16-05-15, you wrote:
Nick,
I should clarify that it is a steel cable fence. So there were
three cables running parallel to the ground, that do not touch each
other and appeared unbroken. Each steel cable consisted of several
twisted smaller wires (but still heavy gauge).
The cables ran through slots in fence posts - maybe 10 feet
apart. The supports looked non-conductive, but that would need to be tested.
At the time I had a portable Degen 1103 - which I haven't used with
an external antenna on MW (and I'm not sure how to overide the
internal MW antenna - you might have to induce the signal into it with a coil).
I also have a QS1R which I would just connect any antenna directly
to the antenna connector. But my main question is: "How effective
is it to use a pickup coil on a beverage antenna?" I'm guessing
there'd be a loss of sensitivity (though maybe not a huge issue if
the antenna is long enough - as the signal/noise ratio would still
be very good).
Would there be any loss of directionality?
I didn't even consider that saltwater conductivity would hurt the
beverage directionality! How far should the beverage antenna be
from saltwater?
Thanks,
Aaron
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Fri, 15 May 2015 05:59:41 +0000
From: Nick Hall-Patch <n...@ieee.org>
To: Mailing list for the International Radio Club of America
<irca@hard-core-dx.com>
Subject: Re: [IRCA] steel wire fence in Venice, CA (near Los Angeles)
Message-ID: <20150515055942.cffb25...@texas.kotalampi.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
Some unknowns here, Aaron...is it a single wire on supports? A "wire
fence" is a grid of wires in many people's minds, and that's mostly a
random chunk of metal as far as being a radio antenna. If it is a
single wire on supports, are the supports non-conductive?
Because the bike path is parallel to the salt water, your Beverage
effect may be quite compromised by the water's electrical
conductivity. I suspect you might just get extra signal strength
without much directional effect. As for hooking up to it, that
would depend on what sort of radio you're using. How would you hook
up a random wire to that radio? That might be a good starting point.
Good luck with this,
Nick
At 22:51 11-05-15, you wrote:
I didn't have my radio with me at the time, but there is a steel
wire fence on a bike path in Venice CA which is around 1000 feet.
Could this work as a pre-made beverage?
Can you tap a beverage with a simple coil around it, or what is the
best approach?
https://www.google.com/maps/place/Venice,+Los+Angeles,+CA/@33.9651082,-118.4505142,17z/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x80c2bac03052685d:0x8f1101b40d5c8d3c
Aaron
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