My Father-In-Law allows me to have a receive site at his shop, which happens to be a great location for it. He asked me about putting up an FM radio antenna because reception inside a metal building is obviously poor. I was going to put one up for him but then I thought I should see how my Diamond F23 that is mounted there does at FM. I'm splitting the signal from that antenna with an 8 way divider and I'm only using 5 of the ports so I have a spare port for feeding the FM radio.
The F23 itself is quite good at receiving FM even though I have it tuned to 160MHz, but that doesn't really surprise me with the power most FM stations put out. Problem is I'm using a tuned preamp, 160-162MHz, before the power divider and it pretty much blocks all FM, which it is supposed to do. For now I put a 2 way power divider before the preamp, then feed the FM radio off one side of the divider and then the preamp off the other side. Obviously this is not the ideal setup but so far it hasn't seemed to have a huge impact on performance, but I did have to "borrow" this 2 way divider from another kit I use it in for now.
I thought if there is a Diplexer that can split the signal so I get FM from one side and stuff above 160MHz on the other that would be great, however I'm not finding anything, I realize this is a pretty close and unusual split so perhaps there isn't one made. I probably have the skills to make one if someone could tell me what components to use.
Thanks!
The F23 itself is quite good at receiving FM even though I have it tuned to 160MHz, but that doesn't really surprise me with the power most FM stations put out. Problem is I'm using a tuned preamp, 160-162MHz, before the power divider and it pretty much blocks all FM, which it is supposed to do. For now I put a 2 way power divider before the preamp, then feed the FM radio off one side of the divider and then the preamp off the other side. Obviously this is not the ideal setup but so far it hasn't seemed to have a huge impact on performance, but I did have to "borrow" this 2 way divider from another kit I use it in for now.
I thought if there is a Diplexer that can split the signal so I get FM from one side and stuff above 160MHz on the other that would be great, however I'm not finding anything, I realize this is a pretty close and unusual split so perhaps there isn't one made. I probably have the skills to make one if someone could tell me what components to use.
Thanks!