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Xium TV dish type antenna
I saw in September Popular Mechanics an advertisement for this TV antenna.
Do any of you know anything about it? It kind of seems to good to be true. I have a cabin and would like to buy an antenna for it. Thanks for your opinions. |
#2
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In article n%qUc.312561$JR4.132702@attbi_s54, Dave wrote:
I saw in September Popular Mechanics an advertisement for this TV antenna. Do any of you know anything about it? It kind of seems to good to be true. I have a cabin and would like to buy an antenna for it. Thanks for your opinions. And, things which seem to be true, usually are. My guess... looking at a Web-page description of the antenna and its "spilateral" technology, is that it's likely to behave like a compact omnidirectional antenna located in front of a single reflector. The dish is far too small to deliver a significant amount of focusing/gain as a parabolic reflector, at least at the lower VHF frequencies... it's barely a half-wavelength across. You might get a couple of dB of gain (relative to a dipole) but I don't think you'd get more. Hmmm... in looking at the "goxium.com" web page, I observe that the description of this antenna says that it is "all-directional", compared to a "brand antenna" which is "directional", but the describive blurb claims that "The specially designed 'dish-like' parabolic reflector provides better directional and omni-directional grounding characteristics for ideal center-frequency tuning of local broadcast signals." So... from what I can see, it's an omni, which means that it has little or no directional gain, which means that it's not well-suited for use in a weak-signal / deep-fringe area, or where multipath reflections from nearby mountains or buildings or trees tend to cause "ghosts" in the picture. Seems like an expensive solution, compared to an ordinary roof-mount omni antenna having similar directional gain characteristics. For your situation (I assume "cabin" means "quite a ways away from the city") you'll probably be happiest with a high-gain "deep fringe" VHF/UHF beam antenna (a log-periodic, with a corner-reflector for UHF). Mount it on a mast, as high as is practical. If the stations you want to receive aren't all in the same direction, consider adding a remote-controlled rotator. -- Dave Platt AE6EO Hosting the Jade Warrior home page: http://www.radagast.org/jade-warrior I do _not_ wish to receive unsolicited commercial email, and I will boycott any company which has the gall to send me such ads! |
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