Show us your twig!

[RodBearden]

Hi Keith

I had the aerial mounted by a company called SkyTech who supplied the mast , brackets etc, and charged £59 for the whole job.

The aerial has a plastic coating, and it was mounted "out of the box" - I believe the fitter applied some silicone at the connector where the cable enters the aerial, but apart from that it's all as it came. It's been up for over 18 months now, and so far, no problems.

The aerial itself, along with the cable ready-fitted with connectors, including a patch lead for connecting to the RadarBox itself, cost £127 including postage, from Airband-Online of Macclesfield.

Hope that helps

Rod

[Northern Watch]

Rod

Thanks for the info, very helpful.  I was thinking of doing the job myself but at that price I might look to get someone in to do it.  I also need to source some cable and a patch lead so I will look at the web site you mentioned.  With regards the external coating, I read somewhere that Dampstart spray is suitable but it needs to be reapplied once or twice a year to ensure you get the full protection, not so good if you have to climb up everytime.

Anyone got any better solutions.

Rgds

Keith

[Johnn]

Hey There All
Its great to see all your antenna setups :)
Here is mine in the below attachment, its on a 12 ft pole with a radar 100 ant I think.
I only get around 70 nm max with the external antenna as shown below.
Johnn -

[pjm]

220 NM ain't bad (just shy of the Victorian border from Sydney) - if I ever get my pre-amp working I wonder how much difference it will make?

• RADAR-EXTENDER Antenna
  10 metres low loss cable Westflex-103

[PvB]

A homemade collinear antenne made of RG-58CU coax.
In the rear a homemade double quad with home made preamp on a antenna rotator.

Peter

[Dean]

Slight variation on the theme. My antenna is the Radarama outside at about 25 feet. My QTH is surrounded by hills to the North & West and distant hills to the rest. I decided to install the WiMo pre amp with bias T in the shack. Below are the improvements in distance I obtained. More importantly the number of flights I can now track has gone from averaging 10 -15 to 20 - 30 and the extra ones are distant ones as a bonus.

The ant is fed with ecoflex 10, N type connectors and a fairly short run anyhow (about 6 metres).

Hope this helps anyone looking to get that bit more out of their system.

[nortonbeak]

Here is my SSE 1090 SJ

[t1mb0]

Good idea for a thread I like it.
The antenna is circled red in the centre of the pic, this is looking south, with Portsmouth's Spinnaker Tower visible top left. Photo taken from rising ground(see polar diagram)

Homebrew antenna connected with a couple of metres W103 with ELAD pre-amp.


Hope this all makes sense

[Bell 407]

Hi All,

Here's mine from Johannesburg South Africa.

Located on top of the roof of a 2nd story townhouse complex. Picture taken looking south. Johannesburg International Airport is located about 12km to the Left (or east).

This mount is made up of plastic PVC piping. Works really well as you can house the antenna cables inside the pipe and help protect them from the elements. Also you can basically setup any configuration that you want. The twig consists of a DPD 1090 Antenna and dedicated 108-136 MHz antenna for airband.

At the base of the twig is a plastic lunch box to house the 2 pre-amps. The larger box on the left is a pre-amp for the airband frequency and the box on the right is the Elad 1090 pre-amp.

Works well as you can see from the Polar Diagram.

Cheers,

[juangelb]

Hi bell407

Good work !
Can You tell me how long of coax run for DPD ?
Did You got inproovement of range with DPD + Elad Preamp ?
I tested Elad preamp with a homebrew antenna like DPD, but the range in my case was poor.

Cheers

[Bell 407]

Hi,

I run a 12m length of HDF 195 from the pre-amp to the ARB. To be honest I have only been running the new antenna for 24 hours but I have seen a small improvement in range but not significant.

Note: I used to use RG58 cable as I have to got through a 9 inch concrecet wall and then out and up to the roof. Getting any other thicker cable will not be possible without major construction work to the outside wall.

However, what I have noticed is that aircraft listed and tracked now stay onscreen for the full distance of the polar diagram and do not timeout as often. In other words, I have seen a significant decrease in the number of timeouts that I used to receive.

So all in all I am happy with the improvement.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

[juangelb]

bell407  OK

Thanks for all the feedback.

I think thar in my particular case, what happened is that as I have overhead flights, the result of having a preamp worked in opposit... due to RB being overloaded.

Cheers

[flightchecker]

How about this little fella? Originally serving in conjunction with TACAN Flightline - Testers (thus ideally meeting Mode - S transponders frequency requirement) and now available via a local surplus dealer. (still stocking quite a lot) Mil. specs. of course and available for about Euro 20,- . Excellent performance if compared to dedicated virtual radar receiver antennae, and last but not least “blue” like the sky above.

Simply like it

Karl

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[Canonjohns40D]

Hi all I got a shot of my two DPD antennas today. The Radabox and Miltennas are from the USA but were easy to order and delivery was quick and straightforward. I think they are cracking pieces of kit. For the eagle eyed that is a BMI Baby 737 enroute Belfast Aldergrove coming from the IOM direction.

John