You can’t have a scanner without an antenna, right? Well, I guess you can but it wouldn’t work worth a darn. So, we will go with Yes, you gotta have an antenna. Not all of us live in areas where we can have a decent antenna, apartments, condo’s, HOA’s and SCA’s (Spouse Controlled Areas) typically do not allow ham radio or scanner antennas.
I have for the last 45 years lived in apartments, a couple townhouses and now a house in an HOA. While I would have liked to have bought a home outside an HOA I was not in charge of things, the wife has 2 votes to my one. That is the plight of the married man; do what makes the wife happy, she is worth it.
I have friends who do not have this restriction. My friend Will for instance has a house that is not in an HOA and has several rooftop antennas, including an ST-2 for the scanners. My buddy Bob used to have a house with a Grove Scanner Beam on the roof with a rotator, that made for a lot of fun DF’ing signals.
When I lived in my first apartment, I started dating the rental agent soon after we moved in. This afforded me the keys to the roof hatch and permission to put up an antenna. I lived in a third-floor walkup, so I put up 2 RS ST-3 (#20-176) antennas on the mansard above my apartment and dropped the RG-58 cables thru a drain slot to my window below. I then went down to the apartment and hooked the cables to being them into the bedroom window. I took a piece of 2x2 and trimmed it to fit, cut a groove for the cables and put on some weatherstripping to allow access into the apartment for the coax. This worked exceedingly well, I only needed 25 feet of coax each so even with cheap Radio Shack RG58 it had minimal loss. This lasted the 6 years I lived there. Since I remained on good terms with the girlfriend after we broke up, I was able to keep it.
One ST-3 was used for a couple PRO2004 scanners with a simple T connector and the other on my ham dual-bander after I got my license.
My next place was also a 3rd story walkup but a much older building with a slate roof. It was too steep for me to work on, but I had a friend who was willing (or stupid enough) to climb out my window and install another ST-2 and a discone on a couple chimney mounts. This time however I didn’t have permission, but no one ever said anything. I actually used the discone more for HF SWL reception than anything else. The ST-3 was used for the same ham radio dual bander, we had a 2M simplex frequency and a set of 440 freqs we used for cross-band links in our area for that. Since my scanner listening was mostly local at the time I used a Back-of-set antenna or a mag-mount on my fridge. My apartment was located on the second highest point in town (after the town landfill) and I was 2 blocks from Lake Michigan, so I had great reception for what I wanted to listen to, marine traffic, the local police and fire and the railroad that went by across the street.
A couple years later I moved to a brand-new building, again a 3rd story walkup (these were ubiquitous in the Chicago suburbs). This was right along another C&NW mainline so railroad traffic was my primary target. I also lived 5 miles from O’Hare Airport, 3 miles from Palwaukee (a busy reliever airport) and 2 miles from the Glenview Naval Air Station (which closed a couple years after I moved there) so I really got into aviation monitoring.
I again started dating the rental agent at the new building but was unable to get permission to put antennas on the roof due to a different construction style. I did have an attic hatch in my bedroom closet however so put in several antennas there. A couple ST-3’s, a Discone and a 10M dipole all got installed and worked well enough. I actually made some decent 10M DX contacts, for some reason Texas and Costa Rica were common contacts for me.
I was home sick with the flu in the early 1990’s for a week or so. During this time there was a huge temperature inversion that allowed fantastic ducting to occur. I was working 2M repeaters in Toluca IL (80 miles), Lima Ohio (220 miles) and suburban Pittsburg PA (420 miles). from a 5-watt HT. I was able to log hundreds of new VHF-High band stations on 150-160 MHz. and record the PL’s for my PL List. This lasted about 2 and a half days and then disappeared. It was the most fun with a radio I had had in years.
I stayed in that apartment for 6 years before my wife (whom I met in the mid 90’s) and I bought a townhouse some 15 miles away. Again, I had access to the attic so I filled said attic with antennas, including a pair of ST-2’s 3 or 4 ST-3’s, a couple discones and 20M and 10M dipoles. I lived there for 20 years and when we moved almost 10 years ago, I recovered the ST-2’s and one of the ST-3’s, the rest I abandoned.
In this house my office was in the second-floor guest bedroom. It had sliding doors for small clothes closet so I removed the doors to make the room a little larger. I ran the coax lines thru a hold in the closet ceiling, using a plastic downspout flange to keep the coax lines from rubbing on the drywall. All these came down into the closet and the radio desk was right there.
I had decent results with this arrangement, the dipoles worked OK, but I used them more for SWL than making contacts. This is where I started using many scanners as I really got into fire tone outs, so I have a half dozen BCT15’s just to use as monitors for that as well as a couple Plectrons. This is also where I discovered the Stridsberg multicouplers that I have used ever since.
Almost 10 years ago the wife and I bought our first real house. While we looked at several different ones, they all were in HOA’s. In Arizona these days unless you build yourself it is likely that anything decent is going to be in an HOA. I knew that going in so I decided to deal with it as best I could. I did make sure that the house we bought had attic access and did not use metallic sheathing on the roof (as many homes here do these days). While that increases my electric bill a bit it allows better results from attic antennas.
We moved in here in March and by the time I was in a position to work on antennas it was May. In the Phoenix area it is not unusual for 110-degree temps in May and that happened to be the hottest summer ever in Phoenix so there was no way I was going to spend any real time up in that attic and its oven-like temperatures. I did what any resourceful retired guy would do; I hired someone else to do it. I found a carpenter and had him cut out a piece of the drywall in the office and drill a couple holes in the wall cap, then run a doze or so coax lines into the attic. We were fixing to repaint the inside of the house anyway, so this worked well. I did make one huge mistake however; I had him strap down the coax to the wall studs instead of leaving them loose. My stepson and I took that same wall down again a few years later and unstrapped them as well as expanding the 2 small holes into a single larger one.
Once it cooled down enough for me to work in the attic I went up and installed a couple dipoles (10M and 20M), 3 ST-2’s, 3 ST-3’s, a couple ham dual banders, an ADSB antenna as well as a UHF antenna for GMRS. I have added and replaced a couple since then and a couple years ago a friend and I replaced all the different coaxes with all 9913’s except for the HF stuff which got RG-8X.
I recently added 3 more HF antennas, this time to the exterior. On the roof peak on the side of the house I put in a 20M dipole in sort of an inverted V layout and then 10M and 20M end-feds running along the tile peak line. I am far less than happy with the performance however so I might try to relocate them somewhat this winter. (Too hot to play with them now!)
My current antenna layout includes a couple ST-2’s, a couple discones, a couple ham dual-bands and an Omni-X as well as the HF stuff. I am thinking of relocating one of the ST-2’s to the roof and telling the HOA it is a TV antenna but that remains to be seen if that will work out.
Mobile Antennas:
I have had scanners in the car since I got my license when I was 16. In those days it was Regency crystal scanners and a CB. Later I traded in CB for a ham license and then added GMRS to that.
Cars were easier to deal with, I had no HOA or apartment manager telling me what I could and couldn’t have. My antenna of choice at the start was the Radio Shack mag-mount scanner antenna with 2 coils. This seemed to work well and was affordable and easy to find.
Later my friend Matt turned me on to the Mon-51 antenna from Antenna Specialists. This was a 4-foot all stick with a center loading coil. It worked exceedingly well on low-band. I still listened to a ton of low-band at the time. There was still plenty to listen to, most of the Midwest was still using low-band for the State Police or Highway Patrol and there were plenty of Sheriff’s and local police on it. Skip was common in the summer, so North Carolina, Ontario, California and other areas were easy to hear. East coast and California fire operations on 33 MHz. were always fun to catch and the MON-51 made it that much easier.
Eventually I had 6 or 7 MON-51’s or MON-52’s. The MON-52 added an 800 MHz. element to the upper section. There was also a base version, using the MON-51 or MON-52 element with a ground plane mount. Matt had a rare version of this with the 4-foot-long ground plane elements, by the time I was able to get one of these they changed to the much smaller 18-inch ones. For my attic I made my own mount, putting an NMO base mount up and using wire to make my own ground plane elements for low-band. It actually worked pretty well in the attic!
Back to the car: I started to standardize on NMO mounts in the 1980’s. I would use regular quarter-waves for the UHF and VHF radios and, when I was chasing low-band, the MON-51’s I often had 2 mounted on the car or truck, while large and decidedly ugly they worked great. A few of us that revered this antenna wanted to have it less obtrusive so we started taping over the silver stripes on the loading coil to black it out. We then tried a couple solutions to try to coat the entire antenna black. Paint lasted a few days at best and started to flake off. We then found some liquid rubber coating and made a dipping tube out of plastic pipe. We would dip the antenna in this tube filled with liquid rubber and then set the antennas to dry for a few days. The coating seemed to last about 2 years or so before that stuff started to come off in chunks.
I have tried several other mobile scanner antennas over the years. Since the demise of low-band that really has not been a priority for me. I have been most satisfied with over the years has been the Em-Wave VHF High-band quarter waves. These have fairly thick radiating elements, so the bandwidth is good. I cut them for 146 MHz. so I get a good SWR on the 2M band. They also show a less than 1.7-1 SWR on 440 and 460 MHz. for ham and GMRS work.
The current car has 4 of these, all cut to the same length. The two at the rear ore for the scanners (currently 2 BCD536’s) and one is used for my dual-bander (currently an AT-D578UV) The fourth is a spare with a longer cable stuffed between the seats. This allows me to connect it to an HT, handheld scanner or even my IC-705 when I bring one of these along. This allows me to use a handheld scanner in the car instead of leaving the engine running or the car on Accessory mode, so I don’t wear down the car battery. (Been there, done that.)
I also have had good results with dual-band antennas for scanners, in particular the Comet 14-inch dual-bander. Using the same type of antenna for the scanners as the dual-bander allows me to not worry about what antenna goes where when I remove them for the carwash.
I have also occasionally run an HF rig in the car. I had a Diamond hat-back mount with the UHF connector on it and used an Opek HVT-600 multiband HF antenna. I still have the antenna and might put it on the car one day if we decide to go on a long trip. It should work well with the IC-705 or IC-7100. I used it on my IC-7000 and the IC-706’s I used to have with great results.
Whatever happened to all those MON-51’s I used to have? Well, I sold off the entire collection, I think there were 6 or 7 of them, along with a collection of the bases, washers and a couple other spare parts during a purge. The nearest low-band to me is in central CA and skip just ain’t what it used to be. I sometimes wish I had kept one, but such is life.
Portable antennas:
Now let’s talk about portable antennas. I have a shoebox full of them out in the garage, being somewhat of a packrat I tend to collect them. I also have tested several different ones for work over the years and got to keep the demo versions, adding to the collection.
I keep a few handy in the office that I have found to be good performers. One in particular is the “GRE Wide Band”. It is a tall drink of water and has obvious wire coils around the core. It works great on VHF hi and lo. Another is the Remtronics 842B and 842S (BNS and SMA respectively)
Everyone has their favorite antennas and I have only scratched the surface of antennas that I have used or even still have. I am sure I am forgetting some of the best.
I have for the last 45 years lived in apartments, a couple townhouses and now a house in an HOA. While I would have liked to have bought a home outside an HOA I was not in charge of things, the wife has 2 votes to my one. That is the plight of the married man; do what makes the wife happy, she is worth it.
I have friends who do not have this restriction. My friend Will for instance has a house that is not in an HOA and has several rooftop antennas, including an ST-2 for the scanners. My buddy Bob used to have a house with a Grove Scanner Beam on the roof with a rotator, that made for a lot of fun DF’ing signals.
When I lived in my first apartment, I started dating the rental agent soon after we moved in. This afforded me the keys to the roof hatch and permission to put up an antenna. I lived in a third-floor walkup, so I put up 2 RS ST-3 (#20-176) antennas on the mansard above my apartment and dropped the RG-58 cables thru a drain slot to my window below. I then went down to the apartment and hooked the cables to being them into the bedroom window. I took a piece of 2x2 and trimmed it to fit, cut a groove for the cables and put on some weatherstripping to allow access into the apartment for the coax. This worked exceedingly well, I only needed 25 feet of coax each so even with cheap Radio Shack RG58 it had minimal loss. This lasted the 6 years I lived there. Since I remained on good terms with the girlfriend after we broke up, I was able to keep it.
One ST-3 was used for a couple PRO2004 scanners with a simple T connector and the other on my ham dual-bander after I got my license.
My next place was also a 3rd story walkup but a much older building with a slate roof. It was too steep for me to work on, but I had a friend who was willing (or stupid enough) to climb out my window and install another ST-2 and a discone on a couple chimney mounts. This time however I didn’t have permission, but no one ever said anything. I actually used the discone more for HF SWL reception than anything else. The ST-3 was used for the same ham radio dual bander, we had a 2M simplex frequency and a set of 440 freqs we used for cross-band links in our area for that. Since my scanner listening was mostly local at the time I used a Back-of-set antenna or a mag-mount on my fridge. My apartment was located on the second highest point in town (after the town landfill) and I was 2 blocks from Lake Michigan, so I had great reception for what I wanted to listen to, marine traffic, the local police and fire and the railroad that went by across the street.
A couple years later I moved to a brand-new building, again a 3rd story walkup (these were ubiquitous in the Chicago suburbs). This was right along another C&NW mainline so railroad traffic was my primary target. I also lived 5 miles from O’Hare Airport, 3 miles from Palwaukee (a busy reliever airport) and 2 miles from the Glenview Naval Air Station (which closed a couple years after I moved there) so I really got into aviation monitoring.
I again started dating the rental agent at the new building but was unable to get permission to put antennas on the roof due to a different construction style. I did have an attic hatch in my bedroom closet however so put in several antennas there. A couple ST-3’s, a Discone and a 10M dipole all got installed and worked well enough. I actually made some decent 10M DX contacts, for some reason Texas and Costa Rica were common contacts for me.
I was home sick with the flu in the early 1990’s for a week or so. During this time there was a huge temperature inversion that allowed fantastic ducting to occur. I was working 2M repeaters in Toluca IL (80 miles), Lima Ohio (220 miles) and suburban Pittsburg PA (420 miles). from a 5-watt HT. I was able to log hundreds of new VHF-High band stations on 150-160 MHz. and record the PL’s for my PL List. This lasted about 2 and a half days and then disappeared. It was the most fun with a radio I had had in years.
I stayed in that apartment for 6 years before my wife (whom I met in the mid 90’s) and I bought a townhouse some 15 miles away. Again, I had access to the attic so I filled said attic with antennas, including a pair of ST-2’s 3 or 4 ST-3’s, a couple discones and 20M and 10M dipoles. I lived there for 20 years and when we moved almost 10 years ago, I recovered the ST-2’s and one of the ST-3’s, the rest I abandoned.
In this house my office was in the second-floor guest bedroom. It had sliding doors for small clothes closet so I removed the doors to make the room a little larger. I ran the coax lines thru a hold in the closet ceiling, using a plastic downspout flange to keep the coax lines from rubbing on the drywall. All these came down into the closet and the radio desk was right there.
I had decent results with this arrangement, the dipoles worked OK, but I used them more for SWL than making contacts. This is where I started using many scanners as I really got into fire tone outs, so I have a half dozen BCT15’s just to use as monitors for that as well as a couple Plectrons. This is also where I discovered the Stridsberg multicouplers that I have used ever since.
Almost 10 years ago the wife and I bought our first real house. While we looked at several different ones, they all were in HOA’s. In Arizona these days unless you build yourself it is likely that anything decent is going to be in an HOA. I knew that going in so I decided to deal with it as best I could. I did make sure that the house we bought had attic access and did not use metallic sheathing on the roof (as many homes here do these days). While that increases my electric bill a bit it allows better results from attic antennas.
We moved in here in March and by the time I was in a position to work on antennas it was May. In the Phoenix area it is not unusual for 110-degree temps in May and that happened to be the hottest summer ever in Phoenix so there was no way I was going to spend any real time up in that attic and its oven-like temperatures. I did what any resourceful retired guy would do; I hired someone else to do it. I found a carpenter and had him cut out a piece of the drywall in the office and drill a couple holes in the wall cap, then run a doze or so coax lines into the attic. We were fixing to repaint the inside of the house anyway, so this worked well. I did make one huge mistake however; I had him strap down the coax to the wall studs instead of leaving them loose. My stepson and I took that same wall down again a few years later and unstrapped them as well as expanding the 2 small holes into a single larger one.
Once it cooled down enough for me to work in the attic I went up and installed a couple dipoles (10M and 20M), 3 ST-2’s, 3 ST-3’s, a couple ham dual banders, an ADSB antenna as well as a UHF antenna for GMRS. I have added and replaced a couple since then and a couple years ago a friend and I replaced all the different coaxes with all 9913’s except for the HF stuff which got RG-8X.
I recently added 3 more HF antennas, this time to the exterior. On the roof peak on the side of the house I put in a 20M dipole in sort of an inverted V layout and then 10M and 20M end-feds running along the tile peak line. I am far less than happy with the performance however so I might try to relocate them somewhat this winter. (Too hot to play with them now!)
My current antenna layout includes a couple ST-2’s, a couple discones, a couple ham dual-bands and an Omni-X as well as the HF stuff. I am thinking of relocating one of the ST-2’s to the roof and telling the HOA it is a TV antenna but that remains to be seen if that will work out.
Mobile Antennas:
I have had scanners in the car since I got my license when I was 16. In those days it was Regency crystal scanners and a CB. Later I traded in CB for a ham license and then added GMRS to that.
Cars were easier to deal with, I had no HOA or apartment manager telling me what I could and couldn’t have. My antenna of choice at the start was the Radio Shack mag-mount scanner antenna with 2 coils. This seemed to work well and was affordable and easy to find.
Later my friend Matt turned me on to the Mon-51 antenna from Antenna Specialists. This was a 4-foot all stick with a center loading coil. It worked exceedingly well on low-band. I still listened to a ton of low-band at the time. There was still plenty to listen to, most of the Midwest was still using low-band for the State Police or Highway Patrol and there were plenty of Sheriff’s and local police on it. Skip was common in the summer, so North Carolina, Ontario, California and other areas were easy to hear. East coast and California fire operations on 33 MHz. were always fun to catch and the MON-51 made it that much easier.
Eventually I had 6 or 7 MON-51’s or MON-52’s. The MON-52 added an 800 MHz. element to the upper section. There was also a base version, using the MON-51 or MON-52 element with a ground plane mount. Matt had a rare version of this with the 4-foot-long ground plane elements, by the time I was able to get one of these they changed to the much smaller 18-inch ones. For my attic I made my own mount, putting an NMO base mount up and using wire to make my own ground plane elements for low-band. It actually worked pretty well in the attic!
Back to the car: I started to standardize on NMO mounts in the 1980’s. I would use regular quarter-waves for the UHF and VHF radios and, when I was chasing low-band, the MON-51’s I often had 2 mounted on the car or truck, while large and decidedly ugly they worked great. A few of us that revered this antenna wanted to have it less obtrusive so we started taping over the silver stripes on the loading coil to black it out. We then tried a couple solutions to try to coat the entire antenna black. Paint lasted a few days at best and started to flake off. We then found some liquid rubber coating and made a dipping tube out of plastic pipe. We would dip the antenna in this tube filled with liquid rubber and then set the antennas to dry for a few days. The coating seemed to last about 2 years or so before that stuff started to come off in chunks.
I have tried several other mobile scanner antennas over the years. Since the demise of low-band that really has not been a priority for me. I have been most satisfied with over the years has been the Em-Wave VHF High-band quarter waves. These have fairly thick radiating elements, so the bandwidth is good. I cut them for 146 MHz. so I get a good SWR on the 2M band. They also show a less than 1.7-1 SWR on 440 and 460 MHz. for ham and GMRS work.
The current car has 4 of these, all cut to the same length. The two at the rear ore for the scanners (currently 2 BCD536’s) and one is used for my dual-bander (currently an AT-D578UV) The fourth is a spare with a longer cable stuffed between the seats. This allows me to connect it to an HT, handheld scanner or even my IC-705 when I bring one of these along. This allows me to use a handheld scanner in the car instead of leaving the engine running or the car on Accessory mode, so I don’t wear down the car battery. (Been there, done that.)
I also have had good results with dual-band antennas for scanners, in particular the Comet 14-inch dual-bander. Using the same type of antenna for the scanners as the dual-bander allows me to not worry about what antenna goes where when I remove them for the carwash.
I have also occasionally run an HF rig in the car. I had a Diamond hat-back mount with the UHF connector on it and used an Opek HVT-600 multiband HF antenna. I still have the antenna and might put it on the car one day if we decide to go on a long trip. It should work well with the IC-705 or IC-7100. I used it on my IC-7000 and the IC-706’s I used to have with great results.
Whatever happened to all those MON-51’s I used to have? Well, I sold off the entire collection, I think there were 6 or 7 of them, along with a collection of the bases, washers and a couple other spare parts during a purge. The nearest low-band to me is in central CA and skip just ain’t what it used to be. I sometimes wish I had kept one, but such is life.
Portable antennas:
Now let’s talk about portable antennas. I have a shoebox full of them out in the garage, being somewhat of a packrat I tend to collect them. I also have tested several different ones for work over the years and got to keep the demo versions, adding to the collection.
I keep a few handy in the office that I have found to be good performers. One in particular is the “GRE Wide Band”. It is a tall drink of water and has obvious wire coils around the core. It works great on VHF hi and lo. Another is the Remtronics 842B and 842S (BNS and SMA respectively)
Everyone has their favorite antennas and I have only scratched the surface of antennas that I have used or even still have. I am sure I am forgetting some of the best.
