radioshack discone antenna

[yankee-sierra]

Hello fellas, i will purchase a radioshack discone antenna that runs $75 on the net to connect it to a radioschack pro-2055 and with a rg-58u coax, i want to know if you have experience in this antenna,the airport i want to scan is 10 km away from my home without any important obstruction.do you think the signal will be as clear as good?. thank you................

[blizzard242]

Yes, but try to tune the antenna the the freq. you are tring to get. if you are tring to get a range of freq. then tune it to the middle freq. 108-136 mHZ would be about 127 mHZ. Also you may want to us an RG 8 low loss coax cable, I think 58 may have loss over runs of 50'.

[LORm]

Purely for discussion only, awhile back didn't Radioshack previously offer a repackaged and Radioshack rebranded, high quality Diamond discone antenna?

For $90 you might as well buy Diamond's D-130J. I've read eham.net reviews saying that these are built to last and a good value for the price. I think ICOM's $170 AH-7000 is a rebranded and repackaged Diamond D-130J.

You're going to need a SO239 to BNC male adapter with the Diamond though. I bought and use this with a PL259 adapter for my external - http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/misc/4512.html

[yankee-sierra]

Hello, i just bought a radioshack PRO-2055 scanner, 25 mts of RG-8/U coax and a D-130J discone antenna. i will upload El Salvador´s ATC (ilopango aprt and comalapa aprt)ilopango airport is fine,like 10 km of my home wihout any important obstrustion,but the international airport that is 45 km away and with an obstruction hill of 450 mts, the ground communications sounds a little poor, do you think that if i get a higher mast for the antenna, the reception will improve? thank you

[dave]

Hello, i just bought a radioshack PRO-2055 scanner, 25 mts of RG-8/U coax and a D-130J discone antenna. i will upload El Salvador´s ATC (ilopango aprt and comalapa aprt)ilopango airport is fine,like 10 km of my home wihout any important obstrustion,but the international airport that is 45 km away and with an obstruction hill of 450 mts, the ground communications sounds a little poor, do you think that if i get a higher mast for the antenna, the reception will improve? thank you

With that kind of obstruction right in the way, just a higher mast is unlikely to help that much.  It sounds like you are hearing *some* communication on the ground...so perhaps you could try the higher mast and see how it works out.

Dave

[Carmelo]

Hello I made a comperision a few years with the DIAMOND-D130 & the ICOM-AH7000 Discones and the ICOM came out the winner by miles and how I tested these Discones I was using Belden-9913 with the Diamond and the original 50 feet of low loss cable from Japan with the Icom and they where in the same height and the Icom pulled the signals very clean with no hiss noise in the background while the Diamond signals where not as good and the squelch on the Radios was all the way out and the Icom Discone is been around way before the Diamond Discone & In the next few months I will give some more details on a few Airband custom made Antennas that I bought.

Regards Lino (Melbourne Australia)