I am putting a order in for a SBS-1E this week ...
Welcome to the club!
... and I was wondering if anyone on the group is using the 1090Mhz antenna that Dave is selling over at DPD.
I've been a big fan of all of Dave's antennae for many years, and helped to encourage him to do one for these boxes -- they work on both the SBS-1 and the RadarBox; make sure to tell him which version you want to get the right pigtail, BNC (SBS-1) or SMA (RadarBox or SBS-1e/-1er). I'm very happy with the results on my main box and have deployed a few others; several friends also have them and report great results. His workmanship is excellent, far better than the experiences i've had with the major antenna makers in the amateur world like Diamond and Comet. I think I have at least one of each of the "stock" antennas available (the mag mount; the table-top version with the removable disk-shaped ground plane; the trunk-clip version; and the mast mount with 3-pronged ground plane ... am I missing any of the collection?) and they all have their purposes. They all perform about the same as each other (modulo the mount), and as usual, if you can get them up high and have high-quality cable running to them, they work well. Dave's is a different design and in the common case -- where your mounting location isn't going to be perfect -- it can add some significant benefit. I know that the limits of my reception are much different now than when I was using a stock antenna, pulling in hits from locations and distances that I wouldn't have guessed from looking at topo maps.
And finally: Dave is "one of us" -- he's a long-time milcom listener and adds a lot to the community through his postings and his website that's focussed on the Flight Test segment of the hobby. I think the DPD antenna is a great addition to a Mode-S/ADS-B monitoring setup at a more than fair price. FWIW, I'm also a big fan of what I think is the only made-for-milcom log-periodic antenna, also available from him. Dave doesn't pay me to say good things about his stuff, though I should probably pay him more for the support he's given me over the years (like the time I proudly sent him a photo of my mounting of one of his LPs and he calmly pointed out that I might have mounted it upside down
... but I digress.
