How far out has anybody reached from Newark area

Looking to get a new antenna 8db 800MHz~900MHz Yagi was wondering if Baltimore or Philly would be doable from say 20ft high antenna.

Thanks.

If you're listening with a scanner then no Philadelphia or Baltimore. But you should get New Castle County and Wilmington City. You also may have a shot at Chester County PA and the Maryland FIRST system Cecil County site. If you're using some kind of portable or the Unication G4/5 then you still won't get Baltimore City or County but Philadelphia is an outside possibility provided you have a clear shot to the NE and point your yagi towards Philly airport. You may also get the Harford Simulcast of the CMARC system going the other direction.

Using a BCD996P2 with quad shield rg6 with discone, soon a 8db yagi about 18ft antenna mast.

Maybe raise my antenna or higher gain antenna?
Like 11db

Soon I will get some LMR-400 like 20ft.

I can get DSP and WPD Newark PD

If i move the antenna 20 feet away (meaning more LMR cable I may be able to get it a little higher but I'm weighing the height vs cable loss.

So with that scanner there's a couple other things to consider. First off, using a higher gain antenna plus the additional cable may introduce more noise into your signal. This is especially true if you are near a cell tower site, usually within line of site or about 2000 ft. Those can actually hamper your 800mhz reception or it cut it out completely. Also remember that if you're trying to monitor those simulcast sites, the higher gain and elevation will cause the scanner to receive signal from multiple sources leading to cut outs and poorer reception. Just food for thought.

From Pennsville (not far from the base of the bridge on the NJ side) I can't get Philly. I've tried multiple times. My current setup I've tried with is a 5 element 800-900 mhz yagi in the attic approx 25 feet off the ground, aimed directly towards Philly. There's less than 6" of feedline on that and it goes directly into my RTL-SDR dongle on a Raspberry Pi feeding into the network using RTL_TCP. With that setup, I can't even see any indication of a control channel on any of Philly's frequencies when looking at the spectrum display.

I've never tried to get Baltimore with this setup, so I can't speak to that. I am (barely, and with breakups) able to get Gloucester County, NJ's 700 system, and Chester County, PA comes in rock solid.

My eventual goal is to move the yagi and the Raspberry Pi out onto my mast about 35' up. I expect that to clean up my decode on Gloucester, but I don't expect to see a usable signal from Philly even with that change. The only time I've ever been able to get Philly was on a handheld (Uniden 396) from Blackwood, NJ when I was mobile.

-Ryan