Almost Friday.... everyone check your mic cords.
I've not had a problem with the two Ringo's I
have in Commercial Service. One must take care
during assembly. I will say that Cushcraft's
Quality Control is a bit lacking on "some" of
their Antenna Models, the Ringo being one of
them. The hardware related to the matching
ring is still a bit off-base, but you can get
it assembled and working as described after
scratching your head a bit.
But the units I have do work well after they
were assembled and adjusted. The tune up was
a bit touchy, but once you dial them in to
F-center & 50 ohms, they work pretty well.
You should use the coax and lower ground plane
decoupling unit for most applications. The
original Ringos obtained a bad rap because
of their high radiation angle. Unless you
lived in a deep valley with high mountains
and talked to high level repeaters only.
I flipped a dual band ARX model upside down on
an old tower for space saving (which included
changing the method water drains out of the
antenna) and it works great at 3000' looking
down into the valley (without the decoupling
unit). Has been up better than 7 years now
without a sneeze.
What's nice about the ARX dual bander for packet
and MARS is how you can adjust the main element
length to move it down in the lower end of 144
and 430 MHz. Kill two birds with one stone.
I don't know why so many of you have horror
stories with Ringos. If you can deal with the
assembly well enough, they are very hardy and
good working antennas. I don't experience noise
in duplex operation and they have real colinear
element type - gain over most "wanna'be" or
as-advertised basic VHF Antennas.
My impression is the Ringo Center colinear element
might not do well in areas where real heavy ice
buildup is a problem for all antennas... but
we don't those problems out here. I've had ice
bent radials on both Comet and Diamond antennas
so none of the mentioned brand names pull off the
snow loaded antenna issue so far.
cheers,
skipp
> "Andrew G." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> First problem is going to be the ringo. GET RID OF IT!!!!
> As the wind blows the joints flex and cause noise in duplex
> operation. Second of all, the ringo isn't "great" for 2m
> in general.
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