Hi all,
Much as I’d love FA’s ant, with the postage from USA, bit too pricey for me at the moment…
I’ve come across this Radar-rama antenna, which ive read good things about…
(These are about £35 in maplins too).
How does this compare to FA’s antenna - any one else using one, how do they perform?
(my ant will be externally ridge mounted on a two storey house).
Honestly, ABCD’s cantenna outperforms the FA antenna by far for me.
I can’t find the link, but I believe the radar-rama is analgous, but slightly inferior to the cantenna. Super super easy to build. Mine gets an average 160nm range mounted inside near a window. Give it a shot! the cost is negligable.
I have a sandpiper antenna which is pretty much the same thing as the Radar Rama one. It performs pretty well - on par with the franklin spider I built that gave the best results previously. It’s not outside yet, but will be at some point. It’s quite solid and well made, so it should stand up to bad weather and birds quite well.
I don’t have a flightaware antenna to compare it to unfortunately.
I know nothing of the Radar-rama antenna. I run the FA antenna, a homegrown coco, and a cantenna. My stats at home are nothing to write home about due to hill limiting horizons. But, when travelling in the Western US open spaces, all three easily get over 250 mi coverage. I can only run one at time so have not done head-to-head testing. The only drawback I’ve found to the cantenna is the DW’s question about why I put a half beer can on the RV roof. 
YMMV
Joel
Hi guys,
Thanks for all the feedback and ideas!
My problem / challenge is I dont have the luxury of testing and modding the ants themselves (I know that’s much of the fun with you guru’s on here!).
Everything upstream of the masthead amp is 60ft plus in the air (external ridge mounted), so every time I need to get up there costs c£50 for a “bloke with ladders” 
The thing I liked about the FA antenna is it looked nicely sealed…
The radar-rama design has an N connector in the part where the ground plane legs are attached. It seems pretty well sheltered as when mounted on the stub-mast, the connector is not exposed at all. I bought the one I had from someone on ebay who had it outside for some time. It is externally a bit weathered, but the connector is as good as new, so there doesn’t appear to have been any water ingress.