In article om,
"exal" wrote:

Steve wrote:

snip

Anyway, that is my initial and not-so-scientific impression of the
pa0rdt-Mini-Whip. I feel like I have just discovered SWL after doing it
for 3 years.

Congrats to Roelof for a great work!

Are you in a rural, urban or suburban location? Have you grounded the
coax shield in any way where it meets the antenna? What kind of antenna
were you using before?

I tried the mini-whip and was disappointed, so I'm curious about why it
works so much better for other people than it does for me.

I am in a suburban neighborhood north of the DFW area (Allen
specifically). I did not ground the coax shield. I have been using a
75 ft wire at a height of 8', or the internal whip until now.

I attached the mini-whip to a PVC pipe of about 8 ft length. I
extended it out from a second floor bedroom window at about a 60deg
angle which allows me to anchor it to the window sill and secure it to
the roof overhang. This places the mini-whip at a height of about 20ft
and a distance of about 4ft or so from the side of the house. I ran
the coax down the pipe with cable ties straight to the power feed unit.
The power feed is connected to a 12V deep cycle battery and directly
to the radio via a 1ft coax. Roelof and other users have stated that
it only works well if you get it high and as far away from noise
sources as possible.

Honestly, I am very impressed. It has a much lower noise floor than
using the wire and provides much more gain than the internal whip. The
wire could pull in some stations that are, for me, pretty weak but I
always struggled to understand through the noise. The internal whip is
pretty quiet but just couldn't bring in anything much. Last night I
heard dozens of stations I had never heard before, and the ones I had
heard before were dramatically clearer.

Now I need to state that I am by no means a DXer. I simply do not have
the antenna space or the wife's permission for a large loop or anything
like that. I guess that makes me a BCB listener. That's ok though. I
am very excited about this antenna and plan on spending a lot of hours
re-exploring the bands.

If you want, I can take some pics of my setup and area to which you can
compare your own. It might shed some light.

There is a good chance that if you stood on a ladder holding the radio
at the same location your reception would be about the same on the whip
although the levels would be lower without the active antenna
amplification.

Since the active antenna is an electrically small E mode active antenna
using a battery to drive it instead of a AC mains supply helped keep
the noise floor low so that using it was an actual improvement.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California