I have not used the Stridsburg preamp in question. However, if you are a follower of high end preamps you are probably aware of Angle Linear, perhaps the best single band preamps commercially made for repeater front ends, multicouplers, etc. Chip Angle, owner of Angle Linear recently retired and left a huge void in the repeater preamp business and people are scrambling to find suitable replacements with no luck so far.
Telewave is advertising some of the lower end Angle Linear preamps relabeled with "Telewave" and costing almost four times more than Chip charged (over $700), so that's good to know in an emergency but otherwise far too expensive for this hobby.
Within the last few weeks I've had a few conversations with a guy who has negotiated the rights to Chip's preamps and will be producing high end preamps based on Chip's designs. If you are considering a 700-800MHz preamp in the $170 category it might be worth waiting a bit to see how things are going with this new company.
From what I gather, Chip's retirement coincided with a huge increase in prices for the high end Compac brand enclosures used in his preamps and possibly some of the parts being discontinued. The new company has to find ways around these hurdles but it sounds like they are committed to producing very high performance products and at least meeting the original design specs.
I also mentioned to the new owner that the scanner hobby needs a bullet proof, low noise, broad band, IMD free preamp covering roughly 118 to 1,000MHz with 15 to 20dB gain, a built in FM broadcast band trap, possible built in bias Tee and be somewhat affordable. He is open to this and will be looking into modifying some existing designs to see how they perform. This will not be a quick and easy task, but hopefully there will be something to announce in the near future.
In the mean time, good luck on your 700/800MHz preamp quest and there are occasionally some very good commercial preamps that cover that range on Ebay for cheap prices. I think it would be better to find a single preamp to cover both 700 and 800MHz if you have only one antenna for both bands.
