RadioBanter - View Single Post

August 22nd 04, 06:18 PM

In article , says...

Jim Hackett wrote:

I use a discone on my VR-5000 and PCR-1000. They work well for me from 900
down to WWV at 2500.

I wouldn't disagree that the discone will indeed 'work' down that low, but will
it work well? That's the question.

Heck, a 5' piece of wire will work, but the question remains, will it work
well?

I've never seen a 'discone' that would work well into the shortwave range
unless it was one of the humongous ones such as that used by the FCC at their
monitoring station which used to be located south of me here.

dxAce

"Gene" wrote in message
...
Getting ready to purchase a ICOM 8500, and as I live in a community
where a long wire would be out of the question, I have been told that
a discone will work quite well for my monitoring activities, and will
be rather hard for the grumpy neighbors to see, as compared to a beam,
etc. etc.... . Any comments on this? How high should I install it.
Probably cant go over 15 or 20 feet at the most. I intend to use some
type of telescoping mast, so when one of our Florida hurricanes comes,
I can "bring er down"! Since the antenna will be coupled to the mast,
will I still need to ground it? (I know thats probably a really stupid
question, but it seems as if the metal mast would take a lightning
strike (God forbid!) to the ground, rather than into the house..(??)
A neighbor of mine has a little discone up around 15 ft., and uses it
to transmit on the 6 meter (or is it 20 meter) bank. Works quite well,
he says. Thanks in advance for any info

Exactly. I have two of them, used mostly as scanner testing, and backup
antennas in my attic. Both are fed with 9913 coax (I had enough left off
the roll I bought) and the homebrew 2 meter ground plane I made using
RG6 CTV cable, also in the attic beats them both by a wide margin on any
freq I dial up. Some freqs it's slightly better, some other's it's a
huge improvement. When I had the Icom discone at 40ft, and a Ringo
Ranger 2 at the same height, the Ringo killed the discone so badly I
thought there was something wrong with the cable, so I had my tower
monkey switch the coax between them. I was wrong, the discone just plain
sucks. No other way to put it..

BDK