I'm looking for input on an antenna plan. Currently have a Diamond X500HNA on a water tank. Antenna is mounted on a mast, clamped to the fill pipe on the side of the tank, with base of antenna just above the top of the tank in order to maintain a circular pattern. See the picture attached, taken of the west side of the tank.
I'd like to change to an ellliptical pattern that favors the bigger town in the county which is roughly at 270 deg west and about 6 miles away. The fill pipe is located on this side of the tank. I'd like to put a Decibel 2-bay folded dipole (model?) that I already have, on our mast so that it is above the tank. I'd like to position the dipoles so that one is at about 30 deg NE and the other is at about 150 deg SE. Here's where the elliptical part comes in. I'd like to take a yagi or corner reflector and mount it lower, at the railing or a short distance up the mast, and point it at the town I'd like to focus on at 270 deg west. It would be fed together with the Decibel using a coaxial power divider. The vertical distance from the bottom of the Decibel and the directional antenna would be about 25 feet. I'm thinking that someone has done this before. How does it perform? Can you put antennas to work together like this and come up with a nice egg-shaped pattern without deep nulls? I am willing to spend time working to get accurate phasing lines fabricated for the power divider. Will I run into problems with patterns shifting because of any slight impedance mismatches between the phasing lines and the feedpoints of the antennas? In simple terms, what I'm shooting for is base/mobile coverage out to about 25-30 miles from the NW clockwise around to the SW, and handheld coverage in the town to the west in my elliptical 'blob'. I realize that there are a lot of other variables involved in coverage area such as output power, sensitivity, feedline loss, haat, and so on. Thanks for your input. 73 Paul - KC0HST
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