Want to pick up 60 miles out, what is best for me?

[Wahoos4Life]

I want To pick up a town 60 miles away. Most of what is between me and the City that I am trying to hit is Rural land.(no other cities in the way)

What would be the best antenna to use on a pro 106 to do this?

 

[k9rzz]

What frequency?

42? 150? 450? 800?

 

[code3cowboy]

I presume you are talking about richmond. As the land is not flat between you and them, you are best suited by putting up some form of tower or finding a good high spot in which to mount your antenna. A yagi or panel antenna will suit you best as they are highly directional, and with your distance and the 800mhz system you will be on the fringes of coverage as 800mhz is very localized.

 

[Wahoos4Life]

I presume you are talking about richmond. As the land is not flat between you and them, you are best suited by putting up some form of tower or finding a good high spot in which to mount your antenna. A yagi or panel antenna will suit you best as they are highly directional, and with your distance and the 800mhz system you will be on the fringes of coverage as 800mhz is very localized.

Yes Sir you are correct, Richmond/Henrico. I am going after 100mhz-800mhz.

I was probably going to put something up on the roof, of a normal single story house. what would be a good yagi or panel antenna for this?

 

[W4KRR]

Yes Sir you are correct, Richmond/Henrico. I am going after 100mhz-800mhz.

I was probably going to put something up on the roof, of a normal single story house. what would be a good yagi or panel antenna for this?

One single yagi antenna won't cover from 100 to 800MHz. You would need something like a log periodic antenna, which has a wide bandwidth. You would also have to mount the antenna up as high as possible, point it directly at the transmitter location, and even so, 60 miles (IMO) would be a stretch for successful monitoring. In fact I can't hear the county next to mine even though it's only about 25 miles distant. YMMV.

 

[radiopro52]

Receiving 60+ miles away is possible in VHF, but very hard in UHF. The transmitting station would have to be outputting alot of power to receive well at that distance.

 

[rfradioconsult]

There are programs that can do a path study between your location and the desired transmitting site that will tell you if you can even receive the distant station; I would suggest you run a path study before spending next month's beer money.

 

[sjlamb]

Absent an extreme outlay of big time cash.... your range expectation of 60 miles reception across a range of 100-800 mHz.... is relatively unrealistic. You're gonna need some VERY deep pockets to consistently pull that off.

 

[phatboy48]

There is a reasonable chance that you will be able to hear some of the higher profile VHF systems at 60 miles. Your home would need to be on a hill or at least have good elevation above mean sea level with no intervening mountains, hills, etc between you and the city. As for 450 mHz systems, they will prove to be more of a challenge with regular reception somewhat iffy unless there is some form of enhance propagation taking place.

At 800 mHz and above, we are talking basically line-of-sight with relatively little or no signal refraction taking place at the visual horizon of the antenna system like would occur on the lower bands. Here's a rough rule of thumb you can use to crudely guesstimate system coverage. Find a line-of-sight calculator and determine LOS distances with typical antenna hights of , say 30 feet for your end and 300 feet for the system end. Next multiply the answer by 1.5 to get VHF radio range, 1.2 for UHF radio range and 1.0 for 800 mHz radio range. This is not cutting edge accurate, but will give you and educated guess of what to expect

 

[UPMan]

Check out this thread: http://forums.radioreference.com/general-scanning-forum/115818-how-far-can-i-receive.html

You should be able to use it to determine the antenna height you'll need for line-of-site to the transmitting antenna (neglecting buildings and foliage).

 

[texasemt13]

Let's just say I can get about 40 ft. in the air, and from 29 miles, I have a hard time getting a steady signal strength on an 800MHz TRS (my elevation is higher than the TRS as well). I think your best bet would be a lot of height + directional antennas (an 800MHz yagi for starters). It can be done but don't expect great results (especially with just rooftop height).