Double Duck

[orbital]

I'm considering several antenna's and was wondering if anyone has had any experience with Double Ducks. Do these devices really work?

 

[SAR923]

It's just a splitter that happens to use BNC connectors. If you're asking about using two rubber duck antennas on a portable scanner, you'll just end up with completely unpredictable results. The most likely thing is that you will just have half the signal from both antennas. What exactly are you trying to accomplish.

 

[W4KRR]

I think it's more of a gimmick than anything else. They must figure that people will assume that two antennas will work twice as good as one. If that were the case, everybody would be using them.

 

[orbital]

Thanks guys for the information. I've never used one of these before and was wondering if it made any difference.

What I'm trying to accomplish is to have one antenna increase my HAM coverage while the other antenna increases my 800 band coverage.

Guess it's just a gimmick to make people believe it's working.

 

[Turbo68]

I have tried using 2 Antennas on 1 Scanner and it did not work the reason was it dropped in signal strength and it Picked better with 1 Antenna and I have also tried the same on my Home Base Receivers and got the same result.

Lino (Melbourne Australia) ALINCO-DJX200E,AOR-3000A,AOR-8200MK3,ICOM-R5,ICOM-R20,ICO-PCR1000,ICOM-R2500,ICOM-R9000,ICOM-R9500,UNIDEN-245,UNIDEN-780,UNDEN-396,UNIDEN-996,MAYCOM-AR108,RADIO SHACK-PRO96,REALISTIC-PRO2035,YAESU-VR500,YAESU-VR5000,YAESU-VX7R.

 

[kb2vxa]

Hi Orb and all,

Any way you slice it you're looking at crap. It can do nothing but attenuate signals from already inefficient antennas taking weak signals and shoving them farther down in the mud.

Oh Carm, being down under have you tried holding the radio upside down? (;->)

 

[orbital]

I was thinking it was just a marketing ploy........ I didn't see how it could
really help radio reception but I did want to ask more experienced users to
get opinions.

Thanks for the info

Orbital

 

[K2GOG]

those splitters were not invented just for scanner people and hams. The primary use was for daisy chaining networks using coax before cat5 type stuff caught on. It is usually called a token ring network. McDonalds I think was the largest user of them adn some schools way back when.

but more to the point here, using that with two duckies on a scanner would do you little good as others have wrote. You may want to think about co-phasing two antennas together and use that to attach the runs of 75ohm coax two, but this is all much better for a base set up or maybe even mobile. There should be other threads on this site regarding cophasing and the like.

 

[orbital]

The primary use was for daisy chaining networks using coax before cat5 type stuff caught on. It is usually called a token ring network.

Yeah, I do remember these from the Token Ring days. If one got disconnected the whole
Intranet would be go down. It was like breaking the flow of traffic by a disconnected link.
I'm glad we got away from that type of network topography, it was a real pain.