Beverage Antenna

The Beverage Antenna is a relatively inexpensive but very effective long wire receiving antenna used by amateur radio, shortwave listening, and longwave radio DXers and military applications. Harold H. Beverage experimented with receiving antennas similar to the Beverage antenna in 1919 at the Otter Cliffs Radio Station. By 1921, Beverage long wave receiving antennas up to nine miles (14 km) long had been installed at RCA's Riverhead, New York, Belfast, Maine, Belmar, New Jersey, and Chatham, Massachusetts receiver stations. The antenna was patented in 1921 and named for its inventor Harold H. Beverage. Perhaps the largest Beverage antenna—an array of four phased Beverages three miles (5 km) long and two miles (3 km) wide—was built by AT&T in Houlton, Maine for the first transatlantic telephone system opened in 1927.

While these antennas provide excellent directivity, a large amount of space is required. Beverage antennas are highly directional and physically far too large to be practically rotated so installations often use multiple antennas to provide a choice of azimuthal coverage.

A Beverage consists of a wire one or two wavelengths long (hundreds of feet at HF to several kilometres for longwave). A resistor connected to a ground rod terminates the end of the antenna pointed to the target area, a 470 ohm non-inductive resistor provides excellent results for most soils. A 50 or 75 ohm coaxial transmission line connects the receiver to the opposite end of the antenna through an impedance-matching transformer. Some Beverage antennas use a two-wire design that allows reception in two directions from a single Beverage antenna. Other designs use sloped ends where the center of the antenna is six to eight feet high and both ends of the antenna gradually slope downwards towards the termination resistor and matching transformer.