> I have three (3) Antel [BCD 80010] 806-900 mHz vertical
> antennae that I would like to mount on the three legs of my
> tower for omni pattern (Rec. only). Several questions come to mind.
>
> 1.) At the rated frequency, how many inches should the side
> arm place the ant. from the tower?
>
> 2.)What would be the best way to phase the antennae? I have a
> Andrews three port "Splitter", and will use "LDF4-50A for
> feedline. I would suspect the length of the pigtail from each
> antenna to splitter is going to be critical.......or not, for
> receive only?
Any time you start to try to phase omni antennas like you're describing,
you're going to end up with nothing like the "omni" pattern you're hoping to
achieve. You'll have deep nulls all over the place, it's just a bad idea.
If you were willing to run the three antennas to three separate feedlines
and feed three separate receivers and vote between them, that would make
more sense, but passively combining the three antennas into one feedline is
going to yield extremely disappointing results. You're better off with a
single omni and eating whatever tower nulls you end up with...
> BTW......How good of an antenna is the "Antel" BCD 80010?
I'm using a BCD87010, which is the 870-960 MHz 10 dBd omni with the standard
1.25 degrees of downtilt on a ham repeater in Philly. It works well and is
built well. Bought it from Tessco a few years ago. Receive performance is
impaired by all of the Part 15 junk, but that's not the fault of the
antenna. The BCD800 series is 806-900 MHz; I don't think I'd want to use it
in the ham band if that's your intention, I'd get an 870 series.
--- Jeff WN3A
