I have been playing with some scripts that were posted here in the forums, I would like to see for some more help in figuring out how many of you are running your feeders. I understand, no two feeders are alike, but there has to be some rule of thumb and pitfalls to watch out for.
based on the scripts results, I settled on running the Prostick Plus on gain of 28 or 29.7 and I am getting the following
Given that the noise floor seems to be lower , I would have thought my range would be pushing to the limits of the horizon, but seems to drop off well before that.
Edited info below:
280’ AGL, ANT220K discone, 7/8 Heliax
Discone is what I have access to - The feedline is terminated into a Minicircuits splitter
ZESC-2-11+, one port feeds into a Minicircuits VBFZ-1065+ filter prior to going into ProStick Plus.
without the filter, there is front end overload. The other port is a second RTL, I have been experimenting with UAT
Gain seems a bit low.
Also the noise floor you see is after the gain of the SDR, so it’s not an absolute thing.
As only the SNR matters … well a low noise floor after reducing the gain a bunch doesn’t really give you anything.
If you have the antenna in clear view of the horizon and would expect more due to your terrain, think about how lossy your coax is and maybe also consider a filter.
Great height, fantastic coax, but the antenna … not so good.
If you must run a discone, you’ll need a filter - it is after all designed to pick up everything.
Discone is what I have access to - The feedline is terminated into a Minicircuits splitter
ZESC-2-11+, one port feeds into a Minicircuits VBFZ-1065+ filter prior to going into ProStick Plus.
without the filter, there is front end overload. The other port is a second RTL, I have been experimenting with UAT
