Diamond V2000A My thoughts

bobruzzo

W1AV
Premium Subscriber
Joined
Nov 4, 2019
Messages
1,414
Location
Cranston, Rhode Island
I recently bought a Diamond V2000A tri band antenna. It replaced a very old Diamond X50 I got back in early 90's. Assembly of the V2000A was pretty easy and it took me and a friend a couple of hours to install new brackets, re route coax and put antenna up. This weekend I will be putting in new 8' ground rod directly below the mast. I have an 800 mhz yagi on the same mast that is used for my sds200 so I can listen to the statewide P25 simulcast system.
The swr on 2/440 is within specs. But I did notice the 6 meter part of antenna is kind of narrow banded. But I have read YMMV. I tuned the longer radial according to the chart that came with instructions. I aimed to tune for the simplex freq of 52.525. Antenna mostly resonant on lower and middle parts of band. Band edges swr about 1.8. I use an LDG AT200 pro auto tuner with my IC 7300 and was a little disappointed the tuner struggled to tune the antenna on parts of the 6 meter band. That tuner works great on my G5RV. So after finding the antennas most resonant area on 6, we decided on the frequency of 51.580 for our simplex chats. SWR mostly 1:1 through 51 mhz portion.
I am very pleased with performance. Me and a few ham friends tested it out and were impressed with range on 6 meter simplex. I am about 14 miles as crow flies from my friend 3 towns south of my location. We were able to chit chat on 51.580 using only 5 watts FM. There are numerous hills between us. BTW this is my first experience with 6 meters. I tried SSB with another ham directly east of me across the bay and it was good reception both ways with about 20 watts. 2 meters and 440 was a definite improvement over the X50. I am using an IC-7300 which does all mode 6 meters. And an IC-2730 dual band vhf/uhf radio. Theres a switch coming from the V200A coax so I can switch between radios and use same antenna. I knew there would be a compromise with a tri bander but I am very pleased with the performance. I did see online some guys replaced the 3 radials with longer ones to make the antenna a 1/4 wave ground plane on 6, but that wouldnt affect 2/440. Probably have much better bandwidth though.
 

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