Radio Shack Scanner Ham Discone ???

[NITROTURBO4U]

Got this antenna 2 years ago.Rat Shack part # 20-043. It is a great antenna for my scanner.
I notice on there new one with same catalog # has a additional vertical at the top.
Any ideas????
Thanks

 

[ScanWI]

Any ideas as to what? What is your question?

 

[KA9QPN]

Generically, discones are a lot like Swiss Army knives: they do a lot of things, but none of them particularly well. If you can only have one antenna and don't mind unity (no) gain or worse on all bands covered, you're set. I have a Diamond clone with a top element. According to the anonymous folks at Wikipedia, the top element is to extend the lower freq range, sacrificing the upper limit somewhat.

 

[prcguy]

The top element on most scanner Discones is a base loaded vertical whip tuned to 50Mhz and it uses the skirt (cone) elements as a ground plane. I find it works surprisingly well on 6m despite the short whip length and inadequate ground plane size.

The whip does extend the low end of the Discone somewhat but as you get away from the 50MHz range performance drops off drastically. I believe the top whip can degrade performance in the region where the Discone part takes over but I've never measured one with and without the whip to back that up.
prcguy

 

[vagrant]

Got this antenna 2 years ago.Rat Shack part # 20-043. It is a great antenna for my scanner.
I notice on there new one with same catalog # has a additional vertical at the top.
Any ideas????
Thanks

It's not that the vertical you see is new, it has always been there on that antenna model. It appears the antenna you purchased was missing that bit. I purchased the same antenna about 3 years ago and it was on there then.