Nate Duehr wrote: > I would also cautiously throw in here (knock on wood) that we've had > EXCELLENT luck with the 2-bay vertical Sinclair folded-dipole antennas > (snip) > > (Heck, if I knew the 2-bays worked THAT good from this type of site, I'd > have put these things up sooner! Soooo much easier to lift a 2-bay VHF > than a 4 or 8 bay... no need for trucks or winches or big brute > muscles... just a dude or two on the ground and a pulley... GRIN!)
Thanks for sharing your experience Nate. In the last week I have been consistently surprised by how well the single dipole I put up on the tower is working. Signals are down a bit from the 8 element array in what were its favored directions, but not by as much as I was expecting. Perhaps I should consider making a 2-bay out of parts from the beast and evaluate that for a while before deciding about going to a 4-bay. Assuming I don't run into noise problems again when I start combining these dipoles into arrays, I'll end up going to 4 eventually. I'm trying to cover an impossible area from the only site available. It's a good site but our terrain around here is NOT VHF friendly. Yep... that darn 8-bay was HEAVY. Ya don't even wanna know how that was installed! Er... or I'm afraid to tell anyone for fear they'd wanna have someone who shall remain nameless committed! ;-) Paul N1BUG
