2 meter/440 antenna for scanner receive
- Thread starter jkalach
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Unless that's all you plan on listening to. I'd suggest getting a discone antenna instead for your base setup.
Diamond D130J is a good example.
Diamond D130J is a good example.
N1EXA
FT8 Huntin Mudd Duck on the deep end of the pond !
It will work good for VHF Hi like Marine and Rail Road and the 440 will work for T Band stuff but if your trying to pull in
700-800-950 trunking systems it will pretty much be a crap shoot and for low band forget about it.
I agree go with a discone like the Tram or Diamond.
Pete N1EXA
700-800-950 trunking systems it will pretty much be a crap shoot and for low band forget about it.
I agree go with a discone like the Tram or Diamond.
Pete N1EXA
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It'll be unity gain. I've used discones on a couple of event supports as they are very wide banded, and covered mid 150s freqs as well as 144-148. I get a VSWR of less that 1.5-1 consistently across the 125-500 freq spectrum.
I'd trash the upper "Low Band" whip. I've found it useless. Others may disagree.
As you say, the discone will be a unity gain antenna... If you don't need any gain then the discone will be OK.
FWIW, I had a Jetstream JTB-2 dual bander.(2m/70cm). (It was a 6 foot long Comet clone). It was a great scanner antenna. I listened to everthing from the FM broadcast band at 88-108 Mhz up to the 460 Mhz FRS/GMRS frequencies. I even plugged it into a TV once and it picked up local TV signals.
When I bought my IC-9700, I wanted a vertical for 1200 Mhz with some gain, so I replaced the Jetstream with a Tri-Band Comet GP-95. On the package, it states that for receive it covers 100-170 Mhz, 350-470 Mhz and 840-1400 Mhz. So that's my current scanner antenna.
FWIW, I had a Jetstream JTB-2 dual bander.(2m/70cm). (It was a 6 foot long Comet clone). It was a great scanner antenna. I listened to everthing from the FM broadcast band at 88-108 Mhz up to the 460 Mhz FRS/GMRS frequencies. I even plugged it into a TV once and it picked up local TV signals.
When I bought my IC-9700, I wanted a vertical for 1200 Mhz with some gain, so I replaced the Jetstream with a Tri-Band Comet GP-95. On the package, it states that for receive it covers 100-170 Mhz, 350-470 Mhz and 840-1400 Mhz. So that's my current scanner antenna.
In my experience, Comet and Diamond 2m/70cm amateur band antennas start to loose performance above about 150MHz and 460MHz where receiving the weather channels at 162MHz can be very degraded and also GMRS at 462/467MHz. If the signals you want to receive out of the amateur band are higher levels then it will work fine. However, if you want to receive things like weak distant VHF/UHF air or railroad or 490MHz, etc, at some point a Discone may be a better choice.
Agree on the Comet dual-band. I had one and the NWS performance was severely degraded.
I use a Slim Jim. Only reason is because I used it for 2m and 440 ham operating previously. Before that I used discones from Radio Shack and Diamond, all were satisfactory for wide band (usually from 25 MHz to about 1 Gig, depending on the model) reception. One thing about dicones though, they were pretty cumbersome to carry up to the roof hihi.
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