"Mark Keith" wrote in message ...

There are half a jillion designs already out there. Also in books. All
designs can scaled to any other frequency. IE: any 2 meter VHF antenna
design can be easily scaled to 160 mhz. Why the rigid construction
requirements?
If you are scaling a design to another freq, you should also scale the
element dia. Luckily, there should be no need to change element diameter
for a rescaled 2m antenna, as it's already close enough. I once built a
marine band 4 element yagi from a thin copper tube as a boom, and
coathanger wire soldered to the boom as the elements. Not the greatest
materials, and it eventually rusted, but I could hear stuff that didn't
exist on verticals. I'm in Houston, and was listening to marine traffic
out towards Galveston, and the gulf. 50-60 plus miles easy... If you
have NBS designs, what are you waiting for? Those spacings are quite
good enough. They do lean towards max gain vs f/b, but you don't need
super f/b with what you are doing. So a NBS design should be fine. "the
f/b is still about 10 db" Thats what I used. My 6m beam is also a NBS
yagi. All my homebrew yagi's use a driven element grounded to the boom.
Also, I use gamma or T matches, etc...I rarely use a split driven
element insulated from the boom. It's more work, and I'm lazy...Only my
store bought "I didn't pay for it" HF beam is built that way. MK

--
http://web.wt.net/~nm5k

Mark

If I am prepared to go with other peoples electrical and mechanical designs
then there is no doubt my task ought to be easy peasy. And as you say there
are zillions of designs out there already.There is a heck of a lot of sense
in taking that approach. :c)

It's perhaps unfortunate that I was started off by being given a model to
run in a program. This may have complicated the approch uneccessarily and
taken me away from what was the more sensible approach.

So obtaining software models and messing with antenna programs is perhaps
rather a redundant exercise.

Thanks for driving that home to me.

Rich