> Real world loss using a hybrid is over 4dB per leg... of which I'm
> not a fan about space heating a radio vault with terminated rf power.
The quadrature hybrid itself should only be 3 dB theoretically, typically
around 3.2 dB in the real world. It's the external circulators that need to
be added to get the necessary isolation that bumps it up to around 4 dB.
You can do productive things with the hybrid's reject port power; it doesn't
have to be connected to a dummy load. You can put an isolator on it (to
guarantee a good match to keep the hybrid's isolation up), and feed the
output to another antenna, such as a corner reflector on the back-side of
the tower to fill in the nulls of your side-mounted omni. Waste not, want
not like my grandmother used to say. But make sure the IM products are
suitably attenuated; ferrites are non-linear devices so they will create IM
when passing two high-level signals.
Or, you can connect the reject port to a dump load to make a nice warm place
for mice to build a nest :-)
--- Jeff
