dragon_slayer79
Member
Hello all, I'm at a stand still on my scanner setup and I'm not sure what I need or should do to get things working at their peak again. I live in a crappy physical location (in a hole) about 7 miles from town, but I have a hill behind my house that I have erected a ~60' tower with a scantenna (ST2) on it to get it above the trees. I'm also using a pre-amp out on the tower about a foot from the antenna. It's a set that the power supply (in house) powers the preamp out on the tower via the coax. I believe it's about a 20dB gain on the amp. Not a 100% on that but think it's pretty close to that anyway. (I know everyone is going to laugh and make fun of this next part, but this is what I have to work with and have been led to believe is the best way to go.) The total cable run from the tower to inside the house is ~300'. I'm using flooded tri-shielded RG6 direct burial cable that is buried from the tower to the house (~200'). From what I've read RG6 is better for just listening because it's design nature is to protect and preserve crappy TV signals which trasfers to other radio signals too. I just moved the antenna from a ~15' pole to the tower today, because being down in this hole I wasn't getting very good signal strength/quality. I'm aware that adding an additional 90' of cable run would hurt, but thought that the gain in better signal would surpass the losses. That hasn't been the case though. I was able to pull in signals from about 45 miles away before I made the change, now I'm having trouble to get half that far. I'm running 3 scanners off the antenna (1 feed and 2 that I listen to) I listen to mostly 150's and the 400's range but I do have stuff throughout the spectrum up to a very few in the 800's analoged trunked. I don't have a hude budget but I am wanting to get this working, so if anyone could offer advice on either amps, cable, or whatever I would be greatly appreciative of the help. Only serious replies please. I'll check the feed and reply as much and often as I can if anyone has additional questions. Thanks for your time and help.