Antenna

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quebecradioguy

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Hi, Just bought myself a PSR-500. I use to have a BC125AT with two antenna on the top of my car. Now, My question: do i need to change those antenna's to work on P25 and EDACS?

Thanks
 

marksmith

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Depends on what the antennas are that you already have and what frequency ranges you want to monitor.

Antennas are tuned to be best on certain frequency ranges. If what you already have is an all band 50-1300 mz antenna it will work the same on the psr500 as it did on the 125at on the same frequencies.

If most of your P25 digital phase 1 scanning will be in 700-900mz there are antennas that improve reception in those ranges over the standard all band antennas. This is true of the rooftop mobile antennas and the handheld antennas.

Mark
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ScannerFreaque

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Hi, Just bought myself a PSR-500. I use to have a BC125AT with two antenna on the top of my car. Now, My question: do i need to change those antenna's to work on P25 and EDACS?

Thanks

Hello!

I've experimented with all kinds of antennas and believe it or not the best overall wideband coverage I get is from a simple 18" whip on an NMO. This is supposedly a 1/4 wave VHF-hi antenna. It works great all the way from VHF-hi through 800MHz. On low band it's very good but not as good as a dedicated low band antenna - you can only stretch the laws of physics so far. For local county reception it works fine on low band. Plus it's very stealthy and low profile.
 

mmckenna

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Hi, Just bought myself a PSR-500. I use to have a BC125AT with two antenna on the top of my car. Now, My question: do i need to change those antenna's to work on P25 and EDACS?

Thanks

Short answer = No. The emission type (P25 or EDACS) is not affected by the antennas. Antennas are frequency dependent, not emission dependent. An antenna designed to work on the frequencies you want to listen to will work just fine.
 

quebecradioguy

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I did order a 300-1300mhz antenna. In the meanwhile, i'm using my 156-512 mhz antenna for 800mhz trunking and it's working fine! I look foward to see the performance with my new antenna when i receive it
 

n5ims

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Hi, Just bought myself a PSR-500. I use to have a BC125AT with two antenna on the top of my car. Now, My question: do i need to change those antenna's to work on P25 and EDACS?

Thanks

An antenna cares about only two factors, frequency and polarity. Frequency is the MHz it is designed to work at. Polarity is pretty much how the antenna is mounted (horizontally or vertically for the most part). They don't care how the signal is modulated on that frequency (it works the same for AM, FM, SSB, TV, Analog, Digital, Pulse, etc.)

The antenna will work the same for the P-25 or EDACS signals as long as they're on the same (or generally close to the same) frequency.

The only time this will change is if you're trying to sell the antenna. If you say it's "Digital" you can sell it for more than if you say it's for the old fashion "Analog". The only reason for the cost difference is that folks don't know any better and assume that a "Digital" antenna will be much better than an "Analog" one.
 

quebecradioguy

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I did order a 300-1300mhz antenna. In the meanwhile, i'm using my 156-512 mhz antenna for 800mhz trunking and it's working fine! I look foward to see the performance
 
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