Need Help On A Good Antenna

[jasonscottlewis]

I am looking to get an antenna for my P25 scanner. Will a Maxx Tenna work? What is the best and reasonable antenna?

 

[W8RMH]

Portable, mobile, or base? Those Maxtennas are useless.

 

[iMONITOR]

Are we to assume 800MHz band?

 

[jasonscottlewis]

I have a Uniden BCD996P2

 

[mmckenna]

I have a Uniden BCD996P2

Well, you are still not giving us a lot of information to work with, but I'll give it a try….

The "Maxx-Tenna" is an all band base antenna. So, without you telling us what you are looking for, we'll guess that you are looking for a base antenna.

Antennas, for the most part, are frequency dependent devices. In other words, they usually work better on a specific (or a couple of specific) frequencies. E-Bay antennas like this are often not great performers, no matter what the salesman tells you on the page. Antenna design is governed by the laws of physics, so there's no magic involved.

If what you are looking for is an all band type base antenna, then for most hobbyists a Discone antenna is a good all around choice.
They will cover a wide section of the radio spectrum, usually frequencies similar to what your radio covers. They are not outstanding performers, but they work well for local communcations.

P25 doesn't matter. The type of radio emission doesn't matter to an antenna, frequency does. Since you didn't tell us what frequencies you wanted to listen to, it's a guess for us, but the discone will work over most of what your scanner will cover. Doesn't matter if it is analog, P25, AM, FM etc. As long as the transmitter is using vertically oriented antennas, an vertically oriented receiving antenna is what you want.

So, discone.
But not just any discone. You can find plenty of cheap Chinese discone antennas out there on E-Bay. You'll get exactly what you pay for.
Problem is, the labor to install an antenna up high on your roof where it'll work best is where a lot of the "costs" are. Climbing up on your roof (dangerous) to put up a cheap antenna that fails after a year or two, the first good storm, etc. and you end up replacing it over and over again isn't a good investment.
For hobby use, Diamond makes some decent discone antennas.

But, the antenna isn't any good without a way to connect it to your radio. You need coaxial cable.
Again, not cheap stuff. All cable has loss. The cable losses go up with cable length. As your cable gets longer, the signal losses go up.
Also, as frequency goes up, so do losses. So, if you want to listen to 700 and 800MHz radio systems, you really need to have decent coaxial cable. A good place to start is with RG-6. This is the stuff commonly used for satellite TV antennas, cable TV, TV antennas, and you can get decent stuff from many hardware stores. You can buy it with F connectors on the end, or you can buy tools to install them yourself (it's not hard). Ideally you want to use the minimum amount of cable you need to get between the radio and your antenna. No more, no less.

You'll need adapters to go between the F connectors on the cable and your radio and antenna. What you need depends on which antenna you get, what sort of connector it has, and what's on your radio (I believe it's an SMA).

Not hard to do, but don't make the rookie mistake of going cheap on your antenna system. Don't spend all that money on a decent scanner then expect a cheap antenna to make it work to it's full potential.