Antenna help please ...

[cino]

after reading through 100's of post I'm more confused than i was before i started.

I have a super old cheap discone missing a radial or 2 and a 20 year old bnc connecter no idea what type the cable is.

i want to connect 436hp to external antenna when at home. I was going to purchase 50ft of lmr-400 once i figure out which one I need. but i just cant decide on which antenna to get. some post say great for this but bad for 800 and vice versa in the next post.

i need something that picks up 800mhz and a few 150.*** mhz signals.
its a roof mounted antenna
I would like to reach out to 20 miles but honestly 10 miles would work

tia

 

[kevin2525]

Replace It!

Replace your old discone with a new one. I have
nothing but great reviews on that antenna. You say
you are going use LMR 400 for receiving. A good
RG-58 will work just as well & a lot cheaper. Just
my 2 cents, Good luck.
73's:Kevin.

 

[N3JI]

Well, my opinion is that if you're looking at mostly 800 and only a few 150 MHz systems, focus on a good 800 MHz vertical antenna with gain. Especially if these are digital systems on the 800 band. I ended up making my own 8 element vertical collinear that works VERY well on 800 and 450 (450 being a bonus I didn't expect), and reasonably well on VHF-hi. I listen to pretty much only NOAA on 162 MHz and it's quite adequate, pulling in at least 4, two very strong, the other 2 or 3 a bit staticy. On 800, I can monitor systems 30+ miles away.

 

[prcguy]

You say RG-58 is just as good as LMR400 and works just as well? If you look up the loss of each cable at 800MHz you will find RG-58 has about 5dB more loss than LMR400 in just 50ft that the OP wants to use. That means RG-58 will loose about 70% more signal than LMR400 in this example.

You can certainly use RG-58 on your scanner antenna but please don't pass on bad advice to someone else that's getting started.
prcguy

Replace your old discone with a new one. I have
nothing but great reviews on that antenna. You say
you are going use LMR 400 for receiving. A good
RG-58 will work just as well & a lot cheaper. Just
my 2 cents, Good luck.
73's:Kevin.