Can I splice from a electroline drop amp?

[kmacka]

Quick question. I currently feed my scantenna to a 4 port electroline drop amp to feed four of my scanners. I am reconfiguring my setup and have two BC898T's coming tomorrow and need them to be hooked up to my scantenna. Now. I want to know if it is possible (without causing harm or serious drop in antenna performance) to hook up one of the four outputs of the first drop amp to the rf input of another electroline drop amp and then that would give me another four outputs. I'm sorry if I'm not clear enough, if I'm not I will try to re-explain what I want to do. But will it work, or just make the signal degraded to unusable levels.

 

[K8PBX]

Sure, it'll work and won't damage anything. How well it will work is another question. If you already have the second Electroline amp, go ahead and try it. If you haven't bought the second amp yet, just get an 8 port Electroline amp instead. That'd be a cleaner setup.

 

[kmacka]

Sure, it'll work and won't damage anything. How well it will work is another question. If you already have the second Electroline amp, go ahead and try it. If you haven't bought the second amp yet, just get an 8 port Electroline amp instead. That'd be a cleaner setup.

I have another 4 port, but I think I am just going to buy the 8 port instead. Ill keep the others for other applications. I was just looking at Ebay and it seems that those electrolines have become alot more expensive and alot less people are selling them since the last time I bought one.

 

[K8PBX]

Yes, they are a little harder to find on eBay, but they do pop up from time to time. I've been using the Electroline amps for years and remain pleased. I've found the best performance using the EDA-UG 2402 (4-port) and EDA-UG 2802 (8-port) models. See here: http://www.electroline.com/en/products/drop_amplifiers/eda_ug/index.html

 

[zz0468]

Stacking line amps like that will probably cause intermod and overload problems. It's unlikely to hurt anything, but it's just about as unlikely to work very well.

 

[N_Jay]

You don't need a second amp.
All you will be dong is adding noise and limiting dynamic range.

The effective sensitivity of the receiver is set by the first active stage. You are using a noisy "drop-amp" as a front and, and have already set the sensitivity.

Gain is only half the equation, but is all some people focus on.

 

[kb2vxa]

Both ZZ and N_Jay are right, cascaded amps is a bad idea for the above stated reasons. If the existing amp provides just a tad more signal gain than needed adding splitters is a much better idea, you can afford the loss. Try it and find out, those Rat Shack TV splitters work as well as any and they're cheap enough to experiment with.

Just a thought, you may better afford the loss in some areas than others so while they may degrade performance on some scanners they might not on others. Remember there is a 3dB loss for each port so using two 2 output splitters is better than one 4 output, in other words distribute the loss rather than lumping it. If you run into such a problem try splitting between other scanners keeping the splitting to a minimum. If nothing works satisfactorily at least you haven't wasted money on expensive splitters.