Jay Camac wrote:
> Is anyone using a single DX Engineering ARAV2-1P vertical receive antenna on
> 160 or 80 meters? I have one and it doesn't seem to be working very well at
> all. Yes, I have communicated with DX Engineering who gave me several things
> to check which I have and all check out ok. I realize this is not a Beverage
> antenna, but think it should work better than it is. I have tried adding
> radials which didn't change anything. If you have one, I'd like to talk with
> you off list and ask you some practical questions.
> _______________________________________________
>
At my QTH, little verticals like this one receive the
same as the big 90 foot transmitting vertical, in terms
of signal to noise ratio. Which is to say all my verticals have made
inferior receiving antennas compared to horizontally polarized antennas,
like a low, short dipole, or even an inverted vee.
Your QTH may be like mine, in which case you will
not find any receive vertical very useful. Or YMMV.
I evaluated the DXE active whips (which I was going
to use horizontally). You have to set up the jumpers
correctly for the band you want to use. There
is more than one possible setting, so you have to
try various ones. Once set, it is basically a one
band antenna. I have a 50 kW BCB station 6 miles
away, which rendered the whip useless on 160 meters.
The advertising points out that the TOI is +30 dBm.
That's good, but around my QTH, it isn't
good enough. It worked OK (ie as well as any other
vertical) on 80 meters.
The built in preamp allows you to get a decent amount
of signal out of a very short vertical. If your
constraints are such that you just can't have a taller
vertical, then this product might make sense.
Assuming your QTH is such that verticals make good
receive antennas. The built in preamp has no magical
properties to change that reality.
One more point: the feedline decoupling is not great,
despite what the advertising says. Looking at the design,
I think it is about as good as can be done with the
architecture. The need to run DC to the preamp limits
what you can do with decoupling. You could still possibly have noise
coupling in on the coax. You could try multiple turns of coax on a big
toroid to see if that helps.
Rick N6RK
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