Telamon wrote:
In article . com,
"Steve" wrote:

Al Arduengo wrote:
I ordered one of these things after reading a blurb about it while
studying antennas. After placing the order I began to read reviews
and was honestly somewhat skeptical. I need not have been.

I received it yesterday and finally put it up today. I attached it
to an 8' section of PVC pipe and mounted the pipe at a 45 degree
angle to the side of my house from a second floor window. I ran
the coax down the pipe and into the window to my E1.

I really did not expect too much based on the reviews I had read
which seemed luke warm most of the time. This thing utterly amazed
me! I compared to the whip as well as my 75' long wire. It
absolutely smoked the whip and performed significantly better than
the wire. A quick gauge for me is how well I receive 5K, 10K, 15K.
I have NEVER been able to hear more than one at a time. Today
with the Mini-Whip, I heard 5,10 AND 15! Granted 15K was a little
low but it was readable. Scanning the BC bands I found that
compared to the internal whip (which is fairly good on the E1), I
was able to pull up signals that were buried in a noise floor at
about S4, to +20 over S9 in some cases. The average increase in
strength for any frequency I checked was 2-4 S units and often to
+30 over S9. And the really neat thing is that the signal was very
quiet. RTI with the internal whip was about S6 which is readable
but skirted in noise. With the mini-whip it was +20 and almost
full quieting! I expected this thing to be a noise amplifier. It
is indeed NOT that.

Anyway, that is my initial and not-so-scientific impression of the
pa0rdt-Mini-Whip. I feel like I have just discovered SWL after
doing it for 3 years.

Congrats to Roelof for a great work!

Are you in a rural, urban or suburban location? Have you grounded the
coax shield in any way where it meets the antenna? What kind of
antenna were you using before?

I tried the mini-whip and was disappointed, so I'm curious about why
it works so much better for other people than it does for me.

I think you are in an urban environment, which probably has a worse
local noise spectrum than at Al's location. You also probably used an
AC supply to power the antenna where Al is using a battery.

--
Telamon
Ventura, California

Not a bad guess, but I actually powered it off an SLA battery. The
problem wasn't noise though--or at least it didn't seem to be. I
compared it to an LF-Engineering H-800, a Wellbrook loop and later a
fairly short (roughly 30 ft) random wire attached to a matching
transformer and fed with coax at a height of around 25 feet or so. All
of these other antennas outperformed the mini-whip (though it was a
close call with the H-800).

Ah well. I will keep the mini whip and no doubt have fun trying to
figure out how to improve its performance.