Strange behavior

[mejnetguru]

I've long had issues hearing some VHF broadcasts. In particular VA STARS has been essentially deaf for me from my home which, to be fair, is in a radio-hell spot with lots of buildings around me.

Strange thing happened though. I recently added a multi-coupler so I could connect several scanners to my outdoor discone antenna. I would have expected this to make it worse with gain loss (though the multi-coupler says no-loss) on those troublesome broadcasts. Quite the opposite happened, I have crystal clear STARS (S-T indicator on TRX still funky behavior though) and other broadcasts on VHF/UHF have improved dramatically.

Same antenna/location, same feed coax, same scanners/config. No clue. Happy, but baffled. Anyone have any idea why the improvement?

 

[ScannerSK]

It sounds as if the antenna was providing too much signal for one scanner thereby overloading it and causing desense. Adding the coupler and more scanners reduced the gain which made the overload and desense condition better.

GRE, Whistler and some RadioShack scanners are particularly prone to this problem.

Shawn

 

[RFI-EMI-GUY]

NOAA weather transmitters are quite powerful and tend to overload receivers on a 24/7 basis, so even a small amount of signal reduction can help in receiving the weaker stations. Same is true for FM broadcast transmitters, some of these receivers have barn door front end filtering.

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