From my experience, the more 'metal' you get in the air for receive the
better.
If you doubt this try attaching a long wire to your receiver and see for
yourself
'tuned' antenna's sound good on paper and as great advertising 'gimicks' but
an 8 inch tuned
antenna will not out perform a 120 feet of long wire (for receive).

and before any of you 'howl' about antenna design, etc etc .... go try it
then leave me a message


"Mike Granby" wrote in message
oups.com...

I have an AV-5 airband antenna [1] hooked-up to my scanners, and it
just struck me that (doh!) I didn't tune it before I installed it.
Looking at their docs, I was horrified to see that the supplied length
of the elements is such that it's way off tune. From my math, it'll be
tuned to around 95MHz instead of the 125MHz that would be the rough
center of the airband. How big a deal is this? Do I have to get the
ladder out again? Or will the losses be managable in an rx-only
application?

[1] http://www.rami.com/gaa/antenna-info.cfm?pid=15