John Kasupski wrote in
:

On Thu, 06 Jan 2005 04:42:00 GMT, "T-bone" wrote:

I got one of those and am not overly impressed with it.
My discone consistantly pulls in stronger signals than the scantenna in
just about every range. The only variables are
1) Discone is about 5 ft higher up
2) Discone uses a better feed belden 9913
3) Discone uses an N connecter vs. BNC for scantenna.

Perhaps those three combined are enough to give the discone an edge in an
of itself, but I doubt much of one. Not much UHF mil around my area
unfortunatly, but I can pull in a wx station at an AFB about 40 miles away
with the discone, and the scantenna doesn't.

Just my observations.

I cannot speak to the relative performance of a discone vs. the
Scantenna because I've never used a Scantenna. I can, however, attest
to the fact that a quality feedline is *extremely* important at UHF
frequencies. Look at a list of specifications for different types of
coaxial cable, paying particular attention to the specified signal
loss (in decibels) per hundred feet of cable. At HF the loss even in
plain old RG-58U is negligible, at UHF, it's astronomical by
comparison. RG-8U is better, but still falls on its face at UHF.

The extra five feet of height, well, most people would be surprised
how much of a difference just five feet of elevation can make in your
reception, especially at higher frequencies.

While I've never used a Scantenna, I used a discone for some time for
monitoring UHF milcomms here in the area near Niagara Falls, New York.
In addition to a USAFR airlift wing and an ANG air refueling wing
based at Niagara Falls, I also sit between a couple of air refueling
tracks and am kind of on the flight path followed by aircraft based in
the eastern US on CORONET EAST missions. The discone allowed me to log
plenty of good catches, outperforming by far one of RadioShack's
multi-band ground planes in that respect.

Granted, they are all factors, which is why I listed them, but I doubt if its
enough to make a difference other than in sensitive test equipment.
The coax used on the scantenna is the highest grade RS sells, isonly about a
30 ft run, and has in fact been exposed to the elements a couple years less
than my 9913.
If the scantenna was really the superior signal gatherer, it should more than
make up for these variables.
Which isn't to say that the scantenna might not be superior for someone else.
Obviously, they get the job done for George, and I'm sure hes a more
sophisticated monitor than myself, as you likely are too.


One thing I did notice, though - the RS ground plane flat-out smoked
the discone on the 30-50 MHz low VHF band, as demonstrated to me by
years of monitoring fire department DX down there.

Do you have a vertical element on your discone ?
This tends to improve discone low band reception sometimes dramatically.
I know the RS discone I use didn't come with one, but a little rubber cap on
top came off, and lo and behold theres a threaded stud in there, juat waiting
for an old CB antenna or some such to be screwed on.
Why this element doesn't come with the package, and why they don't even
mention it in the literature I don't know.