responding to the "new guys coming along"
There's not much commercial interest in Yagi designs (at any frequency) -
existing designs are good enough for most purposes. The differences in modern
designs would be more about hardware implementation - how the elements are
made, attached to the boom, etc. - to meet whatever requirements there are.
And to be fair, I think there's more commercial interest in LPDA broadband
designs. They're more generically useful, and if you need 3dB more to close the
link, you can just increase your Tx power.
As a result, there's not a lot of people who *know* design processes from their
day to day work.
Grinding the design, with modern design tools, is pretty easy and quick,
particularly for the electrical characteristics. There are also decent
mechanical design tools now that can do some analyses pretty easily. Wind load
might be tricky to model adequately.
So you're faced with a limited market, some existing manufacturers who have
products that address that market fairly well. That sort of creates a barrier
to entry - If I wanted to go into the amateur antenna Yagi business, I'd have
to set up tooling, figure out manufacturing, invest in raw material, etc.
That's moderately expensive, and how many antennas are you going to sell in a
year? - so it would really have to be a labor of love. Or you have some way to
fund the development.
(How many times have you heard someone write "There's only $200 of Aluminum in
that antenna, why are they charging $500 for it?" - running a business has all
sorts of costs above "cost of materials" - if it takes 3-4 hours to pack all
the parts into a box and ship it, that's probably $100 in labor and related
expenses)
OK, say you sell 100 antennas a year at $1000 each (which I think is pretty big
sales into the amateur market, but I really don't know). That's only 100k in
sales.
Now consider that you need to build that antenna, probably a few times, to
prototype it and make sure it's makeable and that it doesn't immediately fail
mechanically. Electrically, I suspect all antennas perform pretty much as
expected from modeling these days, unless there's some egregious problem.
Are you going to wind test it? How? OK - you decide not to test it, and just
use "well known principles" (they're in books), and hope for the best and that
you don't get too many complaints or requests to replace after failure.
How are you going to market it? Put an ad in QST? Does anyone actually get
paper QSTs and read the ads any more? Try to get distribution through someone
like DX Engineering? I would think they aren't going to mindlessly have an
infinite number of SKUs, so you have to "fill a niche that isn't currently
filled". That's hard.
And so on.
So that's why you're not seeing new commercial products. A designer can
probably get paid more to do something else. There *are* labors of love -
someone experiments and creates a product for themself, and then figures out
that other people want it. Does the inventor of the spiderbeam make a living
at it? Who knows.
On Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:39:53 +0000, john simmons <jasimmons@pinewooddata.com>
wrote:
Jim, et al:
I've been 'recommending' to hams that they should, if possible, buy a
Yagi of computer aided design. Roger Cox did this at Hy-gain and I
believe his are the oldest computer-aided design Yagis. Most Yagi
manufacturers don't have anyone on staff that can help with
engineering-level questions. One ham that I know of bought a multi-band
Yagi that was way off spec for SWR, basically unuseable. Many hours,
lots of $$$ on tower climbing and so on didn't resolve the problem. The
ham finally took a big loss and bought an antenna from a different company.
The 'new' generation of antenna designers that have been prolific with
excellent designs (N6BT, etc) are long in the tooth. Are there any new
guys coming along?
73
-de John NI0K
On 3/30/2026 10:15 PM, Jim Brown via TowerTalk wrote:
> On 3/30/2026 6:30 PM, Doug Renwick via TowerTalk wrote:
>> Nothing scientific
>
> That's exactly why you don't notice differences -- band conditions
> easily obscure the differences. The difference in gain, averaged over
> each band, between the large Moseley and Force 12 tribanders was 5-6
> dB. 6 dB is an S-unit, corresponding to 4X the transmitter power.
>
> BTW -- it is not "bashing" to do well controlled measurements and
> publish the result.
>
> The report on these tests is "HF Tribander Performance, Test Methods &
> Results, 2nd Edition" by Ward Silver, N0AX and Steve Morris, K7LXC."
> It was published in 1999 by Champion Radio Products. There's also a
> report on a later test of HF multiband verticals. Each costs $20. Ward
> retired from ARRL a few years ago, where he was responsible for
> updates to The Handbook, The Antenna Book, and authoring other books,
> including the ARRL Book on "Grounding and Bonding." I worked with him
> for about 15 years on all three books. Ward is a VERY smart engineer.
>
> https://championradio.com/product-category/publications/
>
> N6BT has published several editions of his very useful book about
> antennas and their design called "Array Of Light." I have either the
> 2nd or 3rd edition (currently loaned out to a new ham, so can't look
> at it). It is written for those who are not engineers, but this
> engineer learned a lot from it.
>
> The current edition is the 4th, and a description on his website says
> it's focused on HF verticals, which is has been his small company's
> focus for a decade or so. For the discussion of HF Yagis, you want the
> earlier edition.
>
> This is the newer book. https://n6bt.com/on-line-check-out-cart
>
> 73, Jim K9YC
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>
>
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