I have been monitoring military and civilian aircraft for almost 30 years. I have tried a number of different antennas, including many discones, DPD production antennas, air band ground planes, multi-band ham etc... I have always felt I was not hearing everything I could with a good antenna setup. I have recently come up with a solution that is working really well for those that are interested. I am using KB9VBR slim jim antennas, one tuned for air band and one tuned for 310 mhz. I have a number of KB9VBR slim jim antennas that I use for transmitting and receiving, and they all work really well. I use the slim jim antennas because they are a very quiet antenna. My monitoring location has a high noise floor on VHF. The slim jim design seems to help reduce noise problem. I feed the antennas to a SSE diplexer, then to a PAR scanner filter, then a stridsberg multicoupler.
Every monitoring location and other factors are unique. This solution seems to work better than all the other antennas I have tried, for an omni-directional antenna at my location.
Receivers and scanners that I have used with this setup are; Uniden BCD996XT, BCT 15, AOR AR8600, AR8200, and Icom R20. They all responded well.
The antenna on the right is just a 2 meter 5/8 wave ground plane type antenna.
Every monitoring location and other factors are unique. This solution seems to work better than all the other antennas I have tried, for an omni-directional antenna at my location.
Receivers and scanners that I have used with this setup are; Uniden BCD996XT, BCT 15, AOR AR8600, AR8200, and Icom R20. They all responded well.
The antenna on the right is just a 2 meter 5/8 wave ground plane type antenna.