Meandering Line "Square Wave Beverage" Antenna for 160 meters?

arodland

The reason this doesn't work is because the "electrical length" of a Beverage doesn't really matter. It's not a resonant antenna, it's a travelling-wave antenna. It develops signal from the difference in the way the signal propagates in the lossy ground, and in the air just above it. *Considered as a resonant monopole or half a dipole*, zigzagging adds some inductance and lowers resonant frequency in a way that's useful (but mostly if you're constrained to a 2D PCB design, otherwise you'd do better by just adding some loading coils), but *considered as a Beverage*, it just means that only 10% of your wire contributes to reception, while the other 90% only contributes to losses. So it should mostly act like a very short Beverage, but degraded by extra wire loss. The added inductance is probably counterproductive, too.