The Dual Beam Pro Antenna and New MQ-2 Antenna

I purchased the Dual Beam Pro antenna and set it up on my temporary 20 foot mast. It took me only an hour to build and I was quickly checking the SWR. However you really have to use an internal or external ATU for all bands (certainly for 40m).

Living out in the middle of nowhere I’m at an advantage that I don’t have any built up areas nearby to obscure the antenna and I get a good take off point for 360 degrees. That said, you tend to forget that my other antennas like the cobweb and the Hustler 6BTV are in an ideal location and behave accordingly, so when you put up something like a pro beam antenna it’s up against stiff competition

It’s quiet and certainly you get good reception on all bands, tuning up was OK except for 40 meters where you need to manually tune but then it did work. Signal reports in to Europe where good and I was regularly getting 5/7 to 5/9.

But when comparing with the cobweb or Hustler it was roughly similar or slightly down. £250 is a lot of money for this antenna but I can see why someone would be happy with it living in a built up area where conditions were not ideal, but if you are living in an area where you’re already getting a good signal, this does not boost like a Yagi or a proper beam antenna like the Moxon.

So after having it up on my temporary mast for most of one day I decided to take it down and sell it. Not because I don’t like it, but simply because it was not what I was expecting, maybe I was a little naive, but that’s the lesson learnt. I’m definitely going for a mini beam antenna, which I should have done before, but sometimes you have to go through hoops and jumps before you get to your end target!

So a few days later I find what I'm looking for a TGM MQ-2 antenna, similar to the MQ-1 but with the WARC bands. These are pretty much the main bands I use so I'm fairly happy with the result. The only issue is the antenna is presently up in Scotland so I'm having to wait while the seller packs it all up and I can go ahead and arrange collection. But my mast has still not arrived yet so I'm happy to wait for the moment.

 

The TGM MQ-2 Antenna

On another matter, looking at my stats for this Blog I see I've reached the 100,000 lookups! I like to say a big thanks to all my readers from literally all over the World, I hope that you've enjoyed the read and in some cases it has either been useful or helpful towards this great hobby of ours!