SDRplay Community Forum

... I've come to realise that I already have 2 ariels up on my roof and they haven't been hit by lightning in 20yrs. So what's the chances of my Discone antenna going the same way. Hardly any I should think. I'll print out both your replies and I'll have a look at that other article glovisol ...

Hi Michael, You can get an idea about my experience with a Discone antenna here: https://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=4109 As far as my experience goes, for low noise recepton it is best to leave the antenna floating: you connct a coaxial ...

... in any signals what so ever. Just got a load of varying static and pretty graphics. Not to be put off by this I bought an SDRPlay RSP1A and a Discone antenna. I intend to mount this on a 20ft pole on the side of my bungalow but am unsure about what I should do about lightning strikes. Are ...

I never use baluns as I find them debatable if they really matter compared to a good tuner and a good transmission-line, like modern coax.

Bas, I mostly check a balun with a VNA and after this is acceptable I fire up the W&G SPM30 and see what the attenuation is on various frequencies. When a balun has a good Return Loss figure the next thing is the resistance and SWR value.

The only thing an antenna-analyser tells you is the impedance at a given freq. It does not tell you anything about it's performance. Very sorry, but because an impedance is high doesn't mean anything. Reception antenna's often have terrible bad SWR, doesn't mean anything. For transmitters it's a dif...

DISCONE ANTENNA SWR PLOTS

Antenna plots with vertical whip mounted above the Discone. Network Analyser connected to the antenna coaxial output to the RSP. Comments invited.

That makes sense. A 135m beverage is basically good for 40m but not 80 or even 160m That explains the low signal levels. As for roasting the box, nah, you won't roast it. I put 1 KW next to it, sure it passes a No-Elec 125MHz upconverter, but it never got roasted. The signals I give it to handle are...

Bas, I installed the Discone ONLY TO RECEIVE FROM 100 MHz and up and this the antenna achieves very well: I receive daily plenty police/aircraft/ 2m band hams. It happened that BY CHANCE I discovered that I could receive acceptable ...