pre amps ! any good
- Thread starter burts
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hoser147
Member
Your going to get mixed results on this one, for some it overloads the scanner and others they work well. GRE makes a couple of different models. I personally would invest in a good antenna and coax before going to a preamp.............Hoser
Take Hoser's advice and see how much of a difference it makes. If you're still not satisfied then go for an amp. If you don't live too close to any cell towers, paging transmitters, radio stations, or other high power transmitters, preamps work great.
mitaux8030
Silent Key
My experience with preamps has always been disappointing with two notable exceptions:
1) old, low sensitivity radio. The preamp did its job nicely here, making the combination 'acceptable' - not brilliant though.
2) modern radio (two way repeater actually) with excellent filtering, quite good sensitivity. Placed a TUNED preamp on the receiver, before the combiner, and achieved approximately 5 dB performance improvement.
In my experience, preamps are definitely not a good thing to have if you're anywhere near the cities with lots of strong signals around - except if you are using a TUNED preamp, with a TUNED (ie single band) radio with good filtering.
Broadband 'scanning' type preamps are going to be of benefit if you're out on the fringes away from any nearby FM, TV, paging etc transmitters, and you have a radio thats low on sensitivity to begin with. A very sensitive radio (eg Yupiteru 7100 etc) probably wouldn't benefit at all from a wideband preamp in this situation, and a narrowband tuned preamp would likely only make a minor difference.
Also note that the higer the gain, the worse the results can be! For example, my tuned preamp above only had 10dB of signal gain - and it only produced 5dB actual improvement. That's normal. If I put a 20dB gain preamp on there, it worked far far worse - in fact worse than if the preamp was not there at all !!
Another thing to take into consideration is Noise Figure. The higher the NF of a preamp, the worse it will be. Broadband preamps are noisy - about 5-10dB NF usually. Narrowband tuned preamps are better, with NFs of 0.5 to 3dB depending on just how good they are.
1) old, low sensitivity radio. The preamp did its job nicely here, making the combination 'acceptable' - not brilliant though.
2) modern radio (two way repeater actually) with excellent filtering, quite good sensitivity. Placed a TUNED preamp on the receiver, before the combiner, and achieved approximately 5 dB performance improvement.
In my experience, preamps are definitely not a good thing to have if you're anywhere near the cities with lots of strong signals around - except if you are using a TUNED preamp, with a TUNED (ie single band) radio with good filtering.
Broadband 'scanning' type preamps are going to be of benefit if you're out on the fringes away from any nearby FM, TV, paging etc transmitters, and you have a radio thats low on sensitivity to begin with. A very sensitive radio (eg Yupiteru 7100 etc) probably wouldn't benefit at all from a wideband preamp in this situation, and a narrowband tuned preamp would likely only make a minor difference.
Also note that the higer the gain, the worse the results can be! For example, my tuned preamp above only had 10dB of signal gain - and it only produced 5dB actual improvement. That's normal. If I put a 20dB gain preamp on there, it worked far far worse - in fact worse than if the preamp was not there at all !!
Another thing to take into consideration is Noise Figure. The higher the NF of a preamp, the worse it will be. Broadband preamps are noisy - about 5-10dB NF usually. Narrowband tuned preamps are better, with NFs of 0.5 to 3dB depending on just how good they are.
RESCUE4NFD
Member
I have GRE 3001 Super Amps on all my radios I use for Trunk Systems.I'm able to pull in systems that I can't receive without the Amps ...
Do a search on this site and you will find plenty of previous discussions about the pros, cons and types of preamps.
Dave
Dave
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