Our club bought a new DB-224E a couple of years ago for around $650 and it has been a great performer. We oriented the top and bottom dipoles to the north where we needed the most gain and the two center dipoles to the south where our primary coverage is required. Our site is on a ridge overlooking the village to the south where most of our users are located.
We replaced an ancient DB-224 which had been modified with 2 inch extensions on the top and bottom of each dipole to move it down into the ham band. The harness was in sad shape on the old one and was probably the reason we saw the remarkable improvement in coverage on the new antenna. Also the original antenna had one dipole on the north side and three on the south side of the pole. Our antenna extends above the top of a 30 ft wood pole barely above the trees. Our primary route into the area is in a canyon where this antenna performs with a lot of multipath and this problem was solved with a linked repeater with a figure 8 directional antenna sited alongside and oriented to cover the canyon. A home brew colinear array with 4 half wave elements was used for this antenna (a lazy H stood up on end). http://sbarcnm.org/gallery_code/Camelot-Rptr018.html 73 - Jim W5ZIT --- On Thu, 9/2/10, Ray Brown <kb0...@sbcglobal.net> wrote: From: Ray Brown <kb0...@sbcglobal.net> Subject: [Repeater-Builder] A DB224E antenna... To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com Date: Thursday, September 2, 2010, 8:26 PM Greetings. I'm the trustee of our local club's 2m repeater. It's NE of the big town of Joplin, MO. (147.210) What I want to find out, I'm going to ask our club to buy a new 224e antenna (assuming that this is the correct version needed for T147.210 R147.810), and arrange the elements on the north edge of the tower we're on so that 3 elements point to the SW, to favor our town so that HTs can work it, and one element to the ENE to point some energy to Springfield for working severe weather. Altho I'm thinking about trying to link the repeater with either EchoLink or some other repeater to Springfield and just point all 4 elements to the SW. :-) But it's on the north leg (that leg points to the north), so if pointing them to the SW gets the highest gain, that sounds great to me. :-) The point is that there's a DB224 there now, not sure if it's an E version or not, but I think it has some issues right now, so I'd rather just get a new one up and bring the old one down and go thru it at our leisure, plus reorienting it so that we can actually USE it. :-) Anyways, I wanted to know if anyone had one here that was in either new- in-box or barely used condition, how much $$ they go for nowadays, and how hard is it to reorient the elements if it was originally designed / set for omni (3, 6, 9, 12 o'clock). Thanks! Ray, KB0STN Trustee, W0IN
