RE: [Repeater-Builder] Inside a Flag pole Tower

[Paul Finch]

Thanks for the "as most of us know" put down!  I have been in the business over 35 years now, I learned most of what I know the hard way through my own research, OJT and with the help of people like Ray Trott and Lloyd Alcorn.  What I learned from them is; you use a lower gain or downtilt from the higher sites to prevent overshooting the base or mobile.  From the lower sites you use the highest gain you can.  What if it does hit the ground in places, you always want saturate what you can with the highest level of power and inversely for receive that you can.  By the way, I do that for the best HT coverage possible.  It all has to do with the angle of radiation and the natural curvature of the Earth.  I can see in some places you would not want to put a high gain antenna, like in the middle of a deep small valley but in the general terrain it's hard for me to arbitrarily say no more than a 8 dB antenna from a cell type/height tower!  Each site is different and has to be evaluated on it's own merit.   Paul   -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, March 07, 2005 7:32 AM To: Repeater-Builder@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [Repeater-Builder] Inside a Flag pole Tower Hello All, And good Monday morning! Sorry for my delay but I do not work every week end. The reason for the 8 DBd on the flag pole support is as most of us know they compress the pattern the higher the gain and flag pole supports are not that high. If you go to high in gain your coverage will suffer. Like a height above average  terrain (HAAT) of just 100' out say 40 miles a 8 DBd will work far better then say 10 DBd. So more real gain is not all ways a good idea. Some times less is more. As they say around the office "WHY PUT ALL THAT GOOD RF IN THE DIRT. The flag pole support folks recommend that at 450 MHz you not exceed 8 DBd when mounting a 450 MHz in side the support. Just the physics of the animals! The 440 Ham band would work close to the 450 MHz band would when mounted inside the support. Good luck with your project we have mounted many antennas inside flag poles for public safety users with very good luck. Your project on the Ham 440 MHz band should serve you very well. Dean Westbrook, EE, PE.   Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Repeater-Builder/   To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]   Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.