Arky Bob wrote:
Anybody here use the tiny-tenna?

Is it any good?

Two instances where an active antenna comes in handy a

1. "Portable" use - I have a milspec preamp and a 3m whip I use with my
AOR 7030+ for camping and vacations. I can set everything up in 5
minutes.

2. If the neighbors generate a lot of RFI, an active antenna placed as
far from RFI sources as possible might make sense. RFI goes down as a
square of the distance, so if you can have your antenna twice as far
from a noise source, the rfi will go down by a factor of 4. In that
case, while the active antenna will amplify noise as well as the signal,
you're still getting a signal to noise improvement.

I have one of those too - a 65' random wire that feeds a preamp, and the
coax runs underground in a pipe that comes back to the house. There,
the preamp is mostly to compensate for the signal loss of a few hundred
feet of coax.

The tiny-tenna does "work", but it's a very simple circuit you could
make yourself with parts from Radio Shaft. Unless you've got a
soldering iron and at least some of the parts on hand it's not apt to
cost less than buying the ready made one. The Tiny Tenna guy is
probably making about $10 an hour after you figure in all the expenses
of making a product and running a business.

Milspec preamps are very well made and can often be found on eBay at a
fraction of what they sold for new. ($40 is typical) Brands to look
for include Avantek, Anzac, Watkins Johnson, Norlin, Aiken, & Applied
Communications. (the last 3 are really the same company - they changed
names often) Years ago I tried an Ar2 preamp and it worked well, but
died young. The milspec ones are much more robust.

But the place to start is identifying what the problems are with your
current antenna, and thinking about ways to solve those problems. You
can accomplish a lot with wire, coax or ladder line, and an impedance
matching transformer.