On 9/21/2013 9:17 PM, Rick - DJ0IP / NJ0IP wrote:
$500 seems like a lot of money to pay for a Receive-ONLY antenna, unless it
will be beneficial most of the time.
Too many hams don't pay enough attention to RX. If you can't hear them,
you can't work them. The best RX antennas can let you hear 6dB weaker
signals. That's a LOT. I work a lot of guys who I can copy on my
Beverages and barely hear on my dipoles. Obviously, cleaning up the
noise in your environment helps too. I've recently gone through the
process of finding all the switching power supplies in my home and
replacing them with linear supplies. The only switchers still here are
for computers. Luckily, they are for Thinkpads, and they're not too bad.
Vertical angle of arrival also matters, sometimes a lot. Beverages are
fairly high angle, vertical arrays favor very low angles. Angle of
arrival can vary a LOT with time and conditions. Those who have both
Beverages and vertical arrays talk about 10-20 dB differences at any
given time on a signal. 2 dB can make the difference between a QSO and a
failure.
My Beverages are designed for 160M, and are 550 ft long, but they work
very well from the AM broadcast band all the way up to 20M. Before I had
a beam for 20M, I used them a lot on 20M to help me hear EU.
73, Jim K9YC
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