Foundations of Amateur Radio

When I started learning about antennas I was told height is might. The higher the better. For many years I've followed that advice and like a good little parrot I've dispensed that advice. Turns out that as is usual in our hobby, that's not the whole story.

I first came across a ground based antenna with a BOG, that's a Beverage On Ground antenna. It's essentially a long length of coax that's pointed at what you want to hear. You can either terminate the end, or not, different effects result with plenty of discussion about directivity, angles, lobes and the like.

One of the things you'll notice with you use a Beverage antenna is that it's quiet. All signals are reduced in strength, but that also means that noise is reduced. Turns out that this pays off and you hear stuff that you've not heard before. Excellent for a field day or if you want to hear some serious DX stations.

There's plenty of stuff that's not nice about a Beverage antenna. For one, it's highly directional, it takes up lots of space and if you want to listen in another direction, you'll either build a second or third and switch between them. That, or you'll be rolling up and laying out the coax to point at a new DX entity.

You also cannot transmit with a Beverage antenna. While we're on the subject, often a beverage can be combined with a vertical, one for receive, the other for transmit. It's one of the projects that lying in my to-do pile. I've even got a remote controlled coax switch, but I'm still figuring out how to make my FT-857d do the switching.

I could stop there, but I came across another idea a couple of weeks ago. At the time I was being introduced to the local emergency communications team. They showed me their HF stand-by gear. Long piece of wire that you could chuck out on the ground and make contact. As a good little amateur I remember thinking to myself, these poor people they have a lot to learn. I'm glad I'm an eager apprentice in learning the art of keeping my big mouth shut.

During F-troop, a weekly net for new and returning amateurs, you'll find details on vk6flab.com, another amateur was talking about putting a wire near the ground, like about a foot off the turf with great results.

I tried it on the weekend with a friend. We were out camping for a local amateur contest, miles from anywhere and anyone and I recalled the emergency communications people and the story during F-troop. We had some time to play, so we started with a long-wire, actually, pretty-much a wire dipole on the ground. Plugged it in, turned on the radio, magic. Same kind of sound effect as a Beverage antenna. Nice and quiet, good signals to be heard. We turned the whole contraption 90 degrees, no difference. Since then I've learned that it's pretty much omni directional and unlike a Beverage antenna, you can use it to transmit.

Of course it's not going to act in quite the same way as a dipole high in the air, and that's pretty obvious, since it's not in the air. It'll give you communications that are called NVIS, or Near Vertical Incident Skywave, essentially stuff that goes straight up and comes down, stations up to about 400 km or so away. For scale, that's enough to cover all of Holland. In Australia it's enough to cover the state of Victoria, or the width of the UK, and most of the width of the State of New York.

Before you get all huffy and point out that this is not a great DX antenna I'll beat you to it and tell you that this is not a great DX antenna. It's not meant to be. Nor is it intended to be an instruction on what antenna to build next. This is purely intended to illustrate that antennas come in all manner of shapes and sizes and there is lots to be learnt from trial and error.

I know that this is a "compromise" antenna. Guess what, so is every other antenna. Today the compromise is that we don't need any poles, trees or unsuspecting human support structures to keep an antenna in the air. You can essentially try this one for free at any time, on your own, on the beach, in a park or on the side of a mountain.

Another great use is to talk to your friends who live in the same city on HF. I have no doubt you could even manage some FT8 contacts using this antenna.

Next time someone tells you to put your antenna in the air, ask them who they want to talk to. If it's locals, then there is absolutely no need at all. As for mastering the art of keeping my big mouth shut, we'll see.

I'll leave you with this. It's not the answer that's important, it's the question, for everything else there's experimentation.

I'm Onno VK6FLAB