The Beverage antenna or "wave antenna" is a long-wire receiving antenna mainly used in the low frequency and medium frequency radio bands, invented by Harold H. Beverage in 1921. It is used by amateur radio, shortwave listening, and longwave radio DXers and military applications. A Beverage antenna consists of a horizontal wire from one-half to several wavelengths long (tens to hundreds of meters at HF to several kilometres for longwave) suspended above the ground, with the feedline to the receiver attached to one end, and the other end of the Beverage terminated through a resistor to ground. The antenna has a unidirectional radiation pattern with the main lobe of the pattern at a shallow angle into the sky off the resistor-terminated end, making it ideal for reception of long distance skywave (skip) transmissions from stations over the horizon which reflect off the ionosphere. However the antenna must be built so the wire points in the direction of the transmitter(s) to be received. The advantages of the Beverage are excellent directivity, a wider bandwidth than resonant antennas, and a strong ability to receive distant and overseas transmitters. Its disadvantages are its physical size, requiring considerable land area, and inability to rotate to change the direction of reception. Installations often use multiple Beverage antennas to provide wide azimuth coverage. History Harold Beverage experimented with receiving antennas similar to the Beverage antenna in 1919 at the Otter Cliffs Radio Station. He discovered in 1920 that an otherwise nearly bidirectional long-wire antenna becomes unidirectional by placing it close to the lossy earth and by terminating one end of the wire with a resistor. In 1921, Beverage was granted a patent for his antenna. That year, Beverage long-wave receiving antennas up to long had been installed at RCA's Riverhead, New York, Belfast, Maine, Belmar, New Jersey, and Chatham, Massachusetts receiver stations for transatlantic radiotelegraphy traffic. Perhaps the largest Beverage antenna—an array of four phased Beverages long and wide—was built by AT&T in Houlton, Maine, for the first transatlantic telephone system opened in 1927. Description The Beverage antenna consists of a horizontal wire one-half to several wavelengths long, suspended close to the ground, usually high, pointed in the direction of the signal source. At the end toward the signal source it is terminated by a resistor to ground approximately equal in value to the characteristic impedance of the antenna considered as a transmission line, usually 400