It certainly works Hal

I use to live in a half below ground block of flats that had a 1/4 wave
for 2M way up on the roof. One day I experimented plugging the coax end
into my field day 5 element positioned at the end of the hallway and
used my handheld maybe 30ft away. Having the yagi connected vs not was
in the vicinity of 12dB but this was a real rough measurement.

Recently I had cause to model a passive repeater on 400MHz. We had a
situation with a base station positioned on a plateau but at maybe 1km
away had a deep valley (railway cutting) that at the base of was
(measured) at around -95dBm. We needed about -85 so we put up a back to
back yagi at the valley edge and with it receiving an approx -10dBm
signal the valley floor was now at around -80dBm at 200M away inside the
cutting. Its actually pretty easy to model. Just find the pathloss of
one link and add it to the other. Allow maybe 3dB loss for the passive
coupling and there is your answer!

Cheers Bob VK2YQA



Hal Rosser wrote:
There was a question posted to another group about connecting to a distant
antenna.
The post reminded me of another article (perhaps in QST) where someone who
lived behind a mountain used 2 rhombic antennas as a "passive repeater" on
uhf. He mounted both antennas at the summit of the mountain with one
pointed to the repeater and the other pointed into the valley where he
lived. As I recall, he was then able to communicate via the repeater.
This brings up other possibilities - like doing the same thing for
inside-outside of a metal bldg.