At field day in 2017, some good friends volunteered to setup an ad-hoc Beverage antenna at my QTH, running straight east-west for about 150 M. That antenna stayed up for almost 5 years, despite being put together in a hurry. A lot of that time, it was left connected to my KiwiSDR receiver and I got all kinds of glowing reports of how well it worked and how quiet my site was.
I spent the afternoon today bushwhacking my way through some of the less friendly, more impassable parts of my property to pull the wire for a new Beverage, oriented SSE to NNE running for some 210 M. I don’t trust my orienteering skills, but I think the wire might have a slight curve to the south, but fortunately, Beverage antennas are very tolerant of this sort of thing and can be setup almost anywhere.
I used some highly recommended wire from Davis RF. It is 18 gauge stranded copperclad steel wire, with a heavy polyetheline jacket. So far, it appears both stealthy and indestructable.
Now I need to rebuild the matching transformer. I bought parts to do this 5-6 years ago and never got around to it. I wanted to follow W8JI’s recipe for the roughly 9:1 step-down transformers needed for Beverage antennas. The part I’ve been fixated on is finding some suitably small wire with a tough jacket, like the Kynar wire that used to be used for wire-wrap projects in the past.
Once this one is in place, I will take a stab at building a shorter (120-150 M) one running orthogonal to this one, so I can get reception from a few more directions.