But AnyWho, you think it’ll be a good combination between that Larson antenna and that groundplane kit? Also, that’s not very much of a gaudy-looking antenna setup as that other one I was talking about either so hopefully the wife won’t really contest that one.
The Larsen antenna on a ground plane will outperform the discone for what I think your use case is.
Sounds like you know exactly who you want to listen to, and they are on VHF or UHF. The Larsen is designed exactly for that, with the added benefit of covering 800MHz, if you ever need that.
The only benefit to the discone is that it covers most of the frequencies your scanner will. It doesn't do it well, but it's good enough for most users. If you were the type of scanner listener that was always searching the bands to hear new stuff, that might be a good option. But it sounds like you only want to listen to the locals, and those are on known bands. The wide spectrum coverage of the discone won't benefit you, and the drawbacks (lack of gain) will negatively impact you.
Plus, lower profile keeping the wife happy is always a good thing.
And as far as using those two together, I’m assuming that, in the photo below, the part of the antenna with the green arrow pointing towards it is what unscrews from the top of the larger diameter part on bottom that the red arrow’s pointing to which would then screw on the top of the ground plane kit, correct?
The black larger base screws on the NMO ground plane. The whip does unscrew from the larger base if you want, but no reason to do that.
Just thread the whole thing on top of the base station adapter. Pretty self explanatory when you have both parts in front of you.
I’m actually somewhat familiar with that NMO connector; never knew what it was called though but as far as that N connector, I’ve never seen one of those before so I’m assuming that’s similar to like a PL-259 connector for a CB radio coax, correct? Guess I’ll just have to look around for some kind of mounting pipe for that ground plane kit to attach to and then hopefully I can find a 20, 25 foot piece of RG58 coax that has the appropriate BNC connector on one end and that N connector on the other.
N connectors are the same size on the outside, but the innards are different and non-compatible. They perform much better than the UHF connectors at the higher frequencies.
N connectors would be the preferred choice for this sort of application.
