About a week after putting up a new 500ft Beverage for Africa, I noticed a significant drop in performance. Today I finally was able to get back out into the jungle to check it out.
I found the last 200ft of wire, the section that traverses a field of very tall cane grass, to be completely destroyed. There were no sections of wire longer than 10ft remaining. This entire length looked like it had been chewed to pieces!
Of course this was because of pigs. This long section spanned an area without supports, but I figured it would be fine because of the wire’s insulation. My other three Beverages are made of copper clad steel, however I used what I had laying around – a 500ft spool of white insulated wire.
Why would the pigs attack this wire and leave everything else alone? I have long runs of black RG-6 coaxial cable laying on the ground, and I have never had any problem with animal damage (the snakes keep the rodent population almost to extinction). Why did they attack this white insulated wire? Here is my guess: Pigs eat grubs. Grubs are mostly white. Pigs see the white wire and think – dinner!
I’ll have to replace this antenna with copper clad or black insulated wire, otherwise I’ll have to come up with some supports to keep the wire out of the reach of pigs!