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While these antennas provides good radio-frequency gain and directionality, a large amount of space is required. Beverage antennas are highly directional and physically far too large to be easily rotated so installations may use multiple antennas to provide a choice of orientation.
A wire of at least one or two wavelengths in length (which can easily be as much as a few kilometres for longwave reception) is suspended several feet above ground. A resistive termination at one end is selected to match the (600-ohm typical) characteristic impedance of the antenna and is connected to ground; the radio feed is connected to the opposite end through an impedance-matching transformer. An SWR meter may be used to determine the exact termination to be used for one specific installed antenna.
Many variants use a two-wire design or a sloped design where the centre is further above-ground than the endpoints.