Tom Horne wrote:

Mike
I already own the J pole I mentioned and an Isopole for two meters. I
expect to have a third two meter omni to cover APRS, Packet, and voice.
I can see me throwing up each of these antennas in turn in a shopping
center parking lot on a Saturday night when all the cars are gone and
doing some measurements. I cannot see me rigging each in turn to the
eve brackets on my house while my victims, I er mean buddies or at least
they would be at first, cool their collective heals waiting for each
successive test. Then there is the possibility that we may need to
pre-install some sort of dual or mono band antenna at each of thirty
plus fire stations and you can see why we might want to know which of
the designs we can build or buy will put out the strongest signal.

I would venture to guess that any of the popular designs will be within
a dB or so of each other. Your bigger concern will be system issues
like cost, feedline losses, construction time, etc.

You might look into some form of collinear array (multiple half waves
stacked on top of each other) because you'll get more gain at the
horizon and still have an easy install. There's lots of these in all
the commercial catalogs (e.g. Tessco), and there's a few in the ARRL
antenna book if you want to build something.



If I
test at my home I will know which antenna works here but I'm unlikely to
be called on to provide emergency communications from my home. I'd like
to find out in as objective way as possible which antenna has the best
chance in terms of power out to get the signal through in conditions
that cannot be known in advance.
--
Tom Horne
--
Tom